When the costume designer John Bright founded the period costume house Cosprop in 1965, it was out of a desire to give the clothes seen in film and TV “a greater realism” than viewers had been used to previously. “I decided that if we made the stock as real as possible, it would be universal,” Bright says. “The truth is the truth for all times.”
Over the intervening 60 years, that relatively simple mission led to the creation of some of the most notable costumes of all time: the Regency-era shirt that, once wet, turned Colin Firth into an instant heart-throb in 1995’s Pride and Prejudice; the safari gear worn by Meryl Streep in 1985’s Out of Africa, which ended up inspiring countless high-fashion runways; Johnny Depp’s dishevelled 1720s Pirates of the Caribbean suit, so artfully soiled that you can practically smell it through the screen.
All of these outfits were the result of tireless research and craftwork by Cosprop’s highly trained artisans, who use period-accurate materials and techniques to achieve cinematic realism.
All of those costumes, and dozens more, are now on display at south London’s Fashion and Textile Museum as part of Costume Couture, an expansive new exhibition that celebrates 60 years of Bright’s groundbreaking work at Cosprop.
“Cosprop was offering something that film-makers were responding to – they wanted more realism in their work,” says the film historian Keith Lodwick, curator of Costume Couture. “Cosprop enabled actors to transform themselves into another person.”
Costume Couture highlights outfits from the entirety of Cosprop’s history, spotlighting the many best costume design Oscar-winners that Cosprop has worked on, including 1985’s A Room With a View, 1992’s Howards End, and 2019’s Little Women. Bright says the exhibition’s broad scope allows the many generations of artisans who have worked at Cosprop to reminisce on the productions that inspired them to enter the world of costume design.
“Most of the girls in the workroom remember [‘90s BBC series] The House of Eliott, whereas the 50-year-olds sort of remember A Room With a View as their key thing,” he says. “It’s quite nice seeing the different generations relating to different aspects.”
Costume Couture highlights a key element of Cosprop’s mission: It makes clothes, not costumes. The distinction is clear for Lodwick. “Cosprop don’t do Bridgerton – Bridgerton is costume. The metaphorical volume has been turned up, the colours, the shapes, the styles, they really have nothing to do with the Regency period,” he says.
“Cosprop anchors itself in clothing that is accurate to the time and place, which is why you can look at something like A Room With a View, made 40 years ago, and it hasn’t dated, because it’s authentic 1906 clothing they’re wearing.”
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Costume Couture is a testament to the dedication of Cosprop’s team: some of the items on display, such as a tiered 1860s dress from Netflix’s 2025 adaptation of The Leopard, were made for extras to wear, and as such may have only appeared in the background of scenes for split seconds. “It’s this quest to make things as true as possible – to give people a view of another time that isn’t our own,” says Bright.
“If we’re seeing something that’s supposedly 1800s, we want it to be proper, unless it’s a programme like Bridgerton, where they’re making fun of the clothes and the times. For most dramas, it’s best to be rooted in reality.”
Many of the techniques employed by Cosprop’s staff are no longer in common practice outside the couture ateliers of fashion houses such as Chanel and Dior. Bright says it’s important to keep these techniques alive in an era dominated by cheap machine work “because the past is always what we build the future on – it’s good to have a string that takes us through from the past to the future”, he says.
He provides an example of a lavish, beaded mermaid’s dress on display from his film, The Underwater Film. “It embodies all the old craft, but in a slightly new way. I always think it’s important to use the past to tell us more about what we could or should be doing in the future.
Lodwick says “a lot of those skills – from alterations to making to millinery – have been lost, and so this one costume house is keeping all those skills alive, so that no matter what project is presented to them, they will apply those [period accurate] techniques, whether it’s Elizabeth or Game of Thrones or Peaky Blinders”.
The relative historical accuracy of these garments – made using period-accurate materials and techniques – makes it easy to forget that the clothes in Costume Couture aren’t “old”, they just look old. Bright has a large archive of historical clothing; where possible, his employees investigate the structure and design of these clothes up close, giving them first-hand understanding of how to construct recreations so close to the real thing that “you can’t tell what’s original,” says Lodwick.
While period dramas are hardly in vogue in the way they may have been in the 1980s and 90s, Lodwick says that there will always be demand for Cosprop’s work. “There will always be ebb and flow – audience taste always changes. There can be a backlash to costume dramas, but as we speak, they’re making a new Pride and Prejudice, they’re making a new Sense and Sensibility, they’re making a new Age of Innocence,” he says. “Perhaps in turbulent times, we kind of need those dramas to take us back to a time where we thought it was all better.”