Inside Cosprop, the spectacular London costume house that’s a ‘dressing-up closet’ for stage and screen

Stepping inside Cosprop’s headquarters, discreetly located in a former garage on Holloway Road, north London, is like walking into a colossal dressing-up closet. There are boxes on top of boxes, from floor to ceiling, filled with fabric samples, ribbons, lace trimmings, buttons and beads. In a room with alcove shelving laden with shoes, bags, parasols, canes, and umbrellas, regal hats sit nonchalantly on top of various display heads. Glass cabinets sparkle with trinkets and accoutrements, from tiaras to paste jewellery. Then there are the acres of rails, on which clothes from six decades of period film, television and theatre hang as mille-feuilles vertically rendered in cloth. In the millinery, dye and alteration workrooms, a team beavers away with their hands, drawing, stitching and repairing, deep in concentration.

It’s deliciously organised chaos. So too is the office of John Bright OBE, Cosprop’s founder. ‘I’m sorry it’s a bit of a jumble in here,’ says the Oscar and BAFTA-winning octogenarian as he takes a seat beside an antique hand-carved room divider and a mannequin mounted with a Cosprop-made dress worn by Kate Beckinsale in James Ivory’s adaptation of The Golden Bowl (2000). This same dress, alongside 84 other garments created by Cosprop, now stars in a newly opened exhibition at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum titled ‘Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop’, which also features the work of award-winning and nominated costume designers, such as Bright’s collaborative partner Jenny Beavan (Howards End, 1992; Sense and Sensibility, 1995), Dinah Collin (Pride & Prejudice, 1995), Alexandra Byrne (Elizabeth, 1998; Emma, 2020), Michael O’Connor (The Duchess, 2008; Jane Eyre, 2011), Jacqueline Durran (Little Women, 2019), and Anthony Powell (Tess, 1979). Each turned to Cosprop to realise their visions, and still do to this day.

Inside Cosprop, cinema’s ‘dressing up box’

‘Of course, 60 years is a long time. But we managed to find and select most things we wanted to include in the exhibition,’ says Bright, who co-curated the show with Keith Lodwick, author of the accompanying book, The Costume House: The Inside Story of Cosprop. ‘There’s also another dress from The Golden Bowl that we made for Uma Thurman’s character Charlotte Stant. This one is particularly interesting to me, because it’s a fancy-dress Cleopatra costume for the masquerade ball scene set around 1904. All of the materials were sourced from one woman I found by chance on Portobello Road, who had all these funny gold embellishments that so happened to be exactly what I was looking for.’

This anecdote is just one example of the bespoke attention to detail that makes Bright’s Cosprop a singular institution. A fervent lover of ‘dressing up’ since childhood – ‘My mother would always buy dressing up clothes from a woman called Winnifred Hoyle,’ the Hampshire-born Bright recalls – he began collecting historical clothing in 1958, after a stint studying acting at RADA and then fashion at Southwest Essex Technical College. Seven years later, when he opened Cosprop at the age of 25, originally located in Primrose Hill, the collection he’d amassed formed the foundation of his craft: the direct replication of clothes in meticulous and authentic detail, right down to the materials and methods used during the time they were first designed. ‘In the 1950s and 1960s, this was virtually unheard of, as costumes for period dramas on the stage and screen were usually interpretations of the contemporary clothes people wore. I was really inspired by BJ Simmons, a costumier who operated from the 1850s to the 1930s and followed a similar approach,’ says Bright. ‘I sort of picked up the baton from where they had left it.’

As Dennis Nothdruft, head of exhibitions at the Fashion and Textile Museum, explains: ‘I think there’s an idea that if it’s a costume, for a film or TV, it isn’t a piece of clothing. It’s something else. What Cosprop does is very, very special in that it creates real clothes that transcend the idea of the stock costume – they are clothes for a real person.’ For the actors who wear a Cosprop piece – Meryl Streep, Dame Maggie Smith, Nastassja Kinski, Nicole Kidman, and more – this provides another dimension to the task of embodying a fictional character. Helena Bonham Carter, who played Lucy Honeychurch in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With A View (1985), for which Bright and Beavan won an Academy Award, is quoted in the exhibition on a wall decal. ‘John and Jenny [Beavan] created wardrobes for people; they didn’t create costumes as we might think of them. There was history in every item of clothing, and this design process helped us as actors,’ she says.

Today, the way in which period drama is consumed and produced has dramatically shifted, with bigger budgets for often smaller screens. In recent years, Cosprop has been behind costumes for acclaimed ‘binge-watch’ series, including Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey. Bright has seen this change unfold in real time. ‘When I started Cosprop, and when I worked with Merchant Ivory particularly, it was very “hand to mouth”,’ he says. ‘I remember shooting in Italy once, and carrying bags and bags of shoes on a bus to set myself. You certainly couldn’t work that way now. There would once only be four of us in the costume department; now there’d be a whole team of 12 people or more. Do you get better results? Not necessarily,’ he reflects.

Changes in technology, such as high-definition cinematography, also dictate the way that a costume is made. For Cosprop, this means even more attention is paid to the minutiae of a garment’s construction. ‘Camera lenses are now almost looking for the tiniest details,’ says Bright. ‘So it’s even more worth the effort of putting them there; otherwise, you can just get a sort of blankness on screen. It’s fascinating, really.’ Costume designer Michele Clapton reiterates this sentiment on a page of Lodwick’s The Costume House: ‘The art of costume design has had to change because of the seismic shift from film stock to high-definition digital cameras. Although many of us mourn the passing of 35mm and its magical diffused look, in many ways, the digital camera allows for greater storytelling in the details, small “Easter eggs” to be plotted into costumes for viewers to pick up on.’

During the age of AI, however, machine-generated imagery looms with uncertainty over the future of art and cinema. So, whether coincidence or otherwise, 2025 is a particularly prescient time to take note of Cosprop’s artistry, which speaks to the visceral, human nature of craft, costume and clothing. Long may it continue.

‘Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop’ is open at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum from now until 8 March 2026.