The fascinating world of The Angels theatrical costume production and storage
One of the ways I find to relieve the stress of life is to seek out beautiful things and superb craftsmanship. I find there is nothing better to offset the negatives and stresses of the world than to look at perfection and beauty, focused on my own particular passion for clothes, the designing, making and wearing of them.
I recently took a tour of the Angels Costume Department in North London, UK. I remember the hire shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, 25 years ago, which I passed regularly whilst driving at speed (you could get around London fast in those days) to get to the next design presentation, with design visuals stacked on the passenger seat of my black Ford Escort XR2 — I loved that car. The window of the shop regularly displayed not only the ‘fancy dress’ for hire but the costumes they had produced for a West End Show — and that’s how I remembered it, a relatively small shop front in Shaftesbury Avenue.
Preparing for my journey on Google Maps I realised that I was going to visit a site in North West London with a two-hour journey by train from the south coast. I had completely missed this point somehow but decided I would make the effort and go anyway. Turns out the train connections worked really well and the journey was stress-free. I arrived at a huge building, walked into a reception like that of a large corporation (which it is now although it is still a family business) and was greeted by the delightful young lady who would conduct our tour. We started with a brief history of the company.
In 1813 a young tailor from Frankfurt by the name of Daniel Angel came to London with very little English and set up a barrow selling second-hand clothes. He soon progressed and moved to a small shop with his son, Morris, providing good quality clothing at a reasonable cost. When an actor asked if he could rent a suit for an audition rather than buy one, the father and son saw a business opportunity and started the hire business.
In those times, an actor going for an audition in London’s Theatreland was more likely to land a part if they wore good clothes or looked the part by wearing the appropriate ‘costume’. Clothing was a huge influencer as to whether you were hired or not.
The Angels’ business continued to grow and flourish and found its way to Shaftesbury Avenue in the late 1880s when they opened their bespoke department and worked with the theatrical managers in West End productions.
Their reputation grew through the era of the silver screen and continues to this day providing hired and paid-for costumes for major productions in theatre and film across all genres. They have provided costumes for some of the great movies — Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr Ripley, and Oppenheimer are some of their many successes.
In 1948 Hamlet starring Laurence Olivier won the Best Achievement in Costume Design Oscar® at the Academy Awards. Angels have gone on to supply costumes to another 35 Best Costume Oscar® winners. In 2015 they supplied costumes to four of the five films nominated for Oscars® in Costume Design and all five films nominated for the Film Costume Design at BAFTA: The Grand Budapest Hotel; The Imitation Game, Into The Woods, Mr. Turner, The Theory of Everything and Maleficent.
Angels is a working environment as well as a colossal storage facility. We started the tour in ‘tailoring’ where they hold the body measurements of hundreds of actors from the current day back to Angels’ inception. They may only have one opportunity to measure the actor so precision is key. Everything is catalogued and stored.
We moved through to alterations. Normally when we make an alteration to our own clothes, whether we do it ourselves or not, we will make it permanent and remove excess fabric. Here, the altered costume may come back in and be hired out again and need to be let out again to the measurements of the different wearer, so the extremely talented staff need to know how to hide the fabric when they make a reduction so that it is available to let out.
- Eight miles of hanging costumes
- Over 100,000 sq ft of costume facilities
- Over one million items
From here we were guided through the literal miles of racks of clothes standing four rails high, the boxes and boxes of shoes of every type, the aisles of handbags from every year, the designer rails holding vintage Valentino, Versace, Chanel, military coats in scarlet embellished with yards of gold braid, the row affectionately called ‘Downton Alley’ which holds all the costumes for that hugely successful series, evening dresses with 15 feet trains.
One of my favourite parts was seeing the ‘badge room’. The badge room holds the insignia, buttons and medal ribbons for every rank and regiment across all of the services, not only UK but around the world. Uniforms are held as ‘blanks’ and the insignia is only applied when it goes out for hire. When it comes back everything is removed and stored for reuse. I found this absolutely fascinating.
The sheer scale of the site and the thousands — over a million actually— of items contained in the aircraft-hanger-like storage room is astounding. If you can think of it, you will find it there and if they don’t have it they can make it. From Greek Goddess to Royal Navy Reserve Captain; from children’s mittens to full body armour. The organisation and cataloguing of the items is astounding — particularly as they still use paper and sometimes carbon paper! They are starting to barcode everything but that is a mammoth task.
I would love to be able to show you the amazing things I saw but Angels have an embargo on taking photographs on their site due to the nature of their work and only allow photographs to be taken in designated areas. Even then they have an embargo on using any pictures I took for social media and the web so in respect to their policy I have only used images from their own website.
If you are interested in clothes, fashion, style or costumes and find yourself in London then the Angels Behind The Seams Tour is a must.
elaineflook.online 