CHARACTERS (3F)

VELL (50s–70s) A dressmaker from Sheffield. Blunt, no-nonsense, working-class Northern grit. Has spent decades perfecting her craft in the shadows of louder names. Keeps her emotions stitched tight, but when the seams rip, they rip fast.

BLUE (50s–70s) An acclaimed conceptual artist from Chelsea. Educated, well-connected, and unapologetically theatrical. Speaks in statements and deflects with flair. Her world is galleries, galas, and curated grief. Keeps VELL close...for reasons she doesn’t name.

LORRAINE (mid–late 20s) A young apprentice from Birmingham. Eager, observant, and sharper than she lets on. Navigates the studio like a guest in someone else’s dream, but watches everything. Knows how to survive by staying just agreeable enough...until she doesn’t.

 

RUN TIME: 80 minutes

SETTING

The present day. A vibrant, overstuffed artist’s studio tucked inside a converted warehouse in East London. Shifting light spills through a high transom window, catching on hanging shears, bolts of fabric, and the ghosts of better decades. Center stage sits a battered workbench bearing the near-complete showpiece: a vintage mourning gown, now deep aubergine, displayed on a dress form and partially smothered in ludicrously fluffy red pom-poms. The space brims with color, friction, and the lingering spirits of a thousand past creations. 
 

SYNOPSIS

The Garment is a brutal tragicomedy about legacy, authorship, and the slow violence of collaboration. In a fading London studio, artist Blue Godfrey and her longtime accomplice Vell Mawsher are racing to finish a black mourning dress for the Tate, a garment meant to cement their myth. But when a young apprentice spots a fatal flaw in the design, it triggers a collapse decades in the making.

What begins as artistic disagreement descends into something more primal: a generational war laced with jealousy, betrayal, and the predatory cost of being someone's muse. Lines blur between love and exploitation, mentorship and control, creation and consumption. And as the power shifts, so does the story about who was really holding the scissors all along.

The Garment is a reckoning dressed in couture, a tragic unraveling of women bound by ambition, rivalry, and the hunger to outlive the work.