Inside Cosprop, the London costume home that’s cinema’s dressing-up field

Stepping inside Cosprop’s headquarters, discreetly situated in a former storage on Holloway Highway, north London, is like strolling right into a colossal dressing-up closet. There are containers on prime of containers, from flooring to ceiling, crammed with cloth samples, ribbons, lace trimmings, buttons and beads. In a room with alcove shelving laden with sneakers, luggage, parasols, canes, and umbrellas, regal hats sit nonchalantly on prime of varied show heads. Glass cupboards sparkle with trinkets and accoutrements, from tiaras to stick jewelry. Then there are the acres of rails, on which garments from six a long time of interval movie, tv and theatre dangle as mille-feuilles vertically rendered in material. Within the millinery, dye and alteration workrooms, a crew beavers away with their arms, drawing, stitching and repairing, deep in focus.

It’s deliciously organised chaos. So too is the workplace of John Shiny OBE, Cosprop’s founder. ‘I’m sorry it’s a little bit of a jumble in right here,’ says the Oscar and BAFTA-winning octogenarian as he takes a seat beside an vintage hand-carved room divider and a model mounted with a Cosprop-made costume worn by Kate Beckinsale in James Ivory’s adaptation of The Golden Bowl (2000). This similar costume, alongside 84 different clothes created by Cosprop, now stars in a newly opened exhibition at London’s Vogue and Textile Museum titled ‘Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop’, which additionally options the work of award-winning and nominated costume designers, resembling Shiny’s collaborative associate Jenny Beavan (Howards Finish, 1992; Sense and Sensibility, 1995), Dinah Collin (Satisfaction & Prejudice, 1995), Alexandra Byrne (Elizabeth, 1998; Emma, 2020), Michael O’Connor (The Duchess, 2008; Jane Eyre, 2011), Jacqueline Durran (Little Ladies, 2019), and Anthony Powell (Tess, 1979). Every turned to Cosprop to understand their visions, and nonetheless do to at the present time.

Inside Cosprop, cinema’s ‘dressing up field’

‘After all, 60 years is a very long time. However we managed to seek out and choose most issues we needed to incorporate within the exhibition,’ says Shiny, who co-curated the present with Keith Lodwick, creator of the accompanying e-book, The Costume Home: The Inside Story of Cosprop. ‘There’s additionally one other costume from The Golden Bowl that we made for Uma Thurman’s character Charlotte Stant. This one is especially attention-grabbing to me, as a result of it’s a fancy-dress Cleopatra costume for the masquerade ball scene set round 1904. The entire supplies have been sourced from one lady I discovered by likelihood on Portobello Highway, who had all these humorous gold elaborations that so occurred to be precisely what I used to be searching for.’

This anecdote is only one instance of the bespoke consideration to element that makes Shiny’s Cosprop a singular establishment. A fervent lover of ‘dressing up’ since childhood – ‘My mom would all the time purchase dressing up garments from a lady known as Winnifred Hoyle,’ the Hampshire-born Shiny recollects – he started gathering historic clothes in 1958, after a stint learning appearing at RADA after which vogue at Southwest Essex Technical Faculty. Seven years later, when he opened Cosprop on the age of 25, initially situated in Primrose Hill, the gathering he’d amassed fashioned the inspiration of his craft: the direct replication of garments in meticulous and genuine element, proper all the way down to the supplies and strategies used in the course of the time they have been first designed. ‘Within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, this was just about unprecedented, as costumes for interval dramas on the stage and display have been normally interpretations of the modern garments folks wore. I used to be actually impressed by BJ Simmons, a costumier who operated from the 1850s to the Thirties and adopted an analogous strategy,’ says Shiny. ‘I kind of picked up the baton from the place that they had left it.’

As Dennis Nothdruft, head of exhibitions on the Vogue and Textile Museum, explains: ‘I believe there’s an concept that if it’s a dressing up, for a movie or TV, it isn’t a bit of clothes. It’s one thing else. What Cosprop does could be very, very particular in that it creates actual garments that transcend the concept of the inventory costume – they’re garments for an actual particular person.’ For the actors who put on a Cosprop piece – Meryl Streep, Dame Maggie Smith, Nastassja Kinski, Nicole Kidman, and extra – this supplies one other dimension to the duty of embodying a fictional character. Helena Bonham Carter, who performed Lucy Honeychurch in Service provider Ivory’s A Room With A View (1985), for which Shiny and Beavan received an Academy Award, is quoted within the exhibition on a wall decal. ‘John and Jenny [Beavan] created wardrobes for folks; they didn’t create costumes as we’d consider them. There was historical past in each merchandise of clothes, and this design course of helped us as actors,’ she says.

At present, the best way during which interval drama is consumed and produced has dramatically shifted, with larger budgets for occasionally smaller screens. In recent times, Cosprop has been behind costumes for acclaimed ‘binge-watch’ collection, together with Sport of Thrones and Downton Abbey. Shiny has seen this variation unfold in actual time. ‘Once I began Cosprop, and once I labored with Service provider Ivory notably, it was very “hand to mouth”,’ he says. ‘I bear in mind capturing in Italy as soon as, and carrying luggage and luggage of sneakers on a bus to set myself. You actually couldn’t work that manner now. There would as soon as solely be 4 of us within the costume division; now there’d be a complete crew of 12 folks or extra. Do you get higher outcomes? Not essentially,’ he displays.

Adjustments in know-how, resembling high-definition cinematography, additionally dictate the best way {that a} costume is made. For Cosprop, this implies much more consideration is paid to the trivialities of a garment’s building. ‘Digicam lenses at the moment are nearly searching for the tiniest particulars,’ says Shiny. ‘So it’s much more definitely worth the effort of placing them there; in any other case, you possibly can simply get a kind of blankness on display. It’s fascinating, actually.’ Costume designer Michele Clapton reiterates this sentiment on a web page of Lodwick’s The Costume Home: ‘The artwork of costume design has needed to change due to the seismic shift from movie inventory to high-definition digital cameras. Though many people mourn the passing of 35mm and its magical subtle look, in some ways, the digital digicam permits for larger storytelling within the particulars, small “Easter eggs” to be plotted into costumes for viewers to choose up on.’