Where The Stars Go For The Right Look
Angels Costume, a family-run shop near London, had a fantastic Oscars night
This year, Fantastic Beasts And Where
To Find Them won best costume design at the Oscars. Along with the other two nominees from the same category, Allied and Florence Foster Jenkins — it’s gotten their costumes from one place: Angels Costume, a family-run shop on the outskirts of London.
We went behind the scenes at the costumer’s headquarters. Founded in 1840 in Covent Garden, Angels does a brisk business with costume designers for movies, TV and theatre productions, as well as stylists and magazine editors. (Among its recent clients are The Crown,
Victoria and Assassin’s Creed.) Most often, what they need can be drawn from Angels’ vast inventory. Other times, Angels staff create costumes from scratch. If you lined up all of the costumes in Angels’ storage in a row, it would stretch about 15km.
The Crown and The BFG are just two of the productions to which Angels supplied household cavalry helmets.
The helmets are shown on display on a wall in the warehouse dedicated to movies that the house has helped costume whose designs have been honoured by the Academy. In all, Angels has worked on 36 movies that have won the Oscar for costume design. The first was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, in 1948. The most recent is The
Grand Budapest Hotel, in 2015. Included in Angels’ collection is a replica of the queen’s coronation dress.
Angels originally made it for a window display at the luxury department store Harrods, not to actually be worn. But when creative executives on The Crown came to the shop looking to dress the queen for her coronation scene, the Angels staff realised a dress in stock was perfect.
Angels achieved certain details on the dress with a kind of design shorthand. Staff at Angels screen-printed plants onto their re-creation, and they also glued on the beads, rather than stitching them. They based their rendering on black-and-white photographs, drawings and a swatch of fabric given to them by the dress’s original makers.
The trappings of royalty are a big part of the shop’s business. One of its more recognisable dresses was worn by Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare In Love, which won the costume designer Sandy Powell an Oscar. And on the new Masterpiece series Victoria, Jenna Coleman, who plays Queen Victoria, wore a dress pulled from the Angels stock for the TV show. As high-definition TV has entered the mainstream, it’s become more important for costume shops like Angels to use highquality fabrics because audiences can spot the difference.
The real-life Princess Margaret hired Angels to build costumes for Old Mother Red Riding Boots, a show that she staged with her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1944.
Also in Angels’ stock: a red jacket, likely originally made as a hunting jacket for an upper-class British man in the 19th century, which was sent to the set of Downton Abbey. Angels keeps it in stock and re-tailors it to fit the actor.
In the “Badge Room”, Angels keeps hundreds and hundreds of military and uniform badges.
The costume shop can also add details, like different buttons, to outfits based on a specific production’s needs, including vintage buttons from the real-life Egyptian navy. The buttons are some of the favourite go-to’s for movies about fictional militaries, Jeremy Angel, a sixthgeneration member of the Angel family, said.
“If you come up with a fictitious army that you’ve created for Outer Mongolia, or whatever you want to call your random country, we will go and use certain buttons that we know we can create a legitimate looking set.”
Egypt’s are particularly good because they have “really good symbology”, Angel said. He noted that the anchor and the eagle made for convincing military icons. They’ve been used in theatre productions, commercials and in the movie Evita. And then there are the furs, which are kept in a refrigerated room so they remain crisp.
One of its more recognisable dresses was worn by Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare In Love