Cosprop the Company

Welcome to the Cosprop website

As this site is intended to be of interest to the casual browser, as well as the industry professional, we have tried to make it generally informative and useful to anyone with a passing interest in period costume..

As much as any other ingredient, costume – or clothing – helps to define the character, period and quality of a film, TV or stage production.

It may be the first thing we notice, or it may go virtually unnoticed. In both cases it is doing exactly the job required.

We might all remember the shirt in which Mr Darcy went bathing, the long, skirted coat that was Withnail’s ‘signature garment’ or the dark cloak that protected Meryl Streep from an elemental buffeting as she scanned the horizon for her French Lieutenant, but in general, clothing doesn’t get a starring role.

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It is, however, intrinsic to the character of a production. It defines its quality, its style and its atmosphere. And in the case of an historical production, or costume drama, it defines its period.

Simply put, our job is to supply a production with the correct clothing for its characters and its period - the clothes they would have worn – and thereby to help fulfill the vision of the costume designer in creating the required period look and feel.

Costuming a period production is as much a work of research and precision as it is of creativity and imagination.


The Periods

The history of fashion is marked by occasional periods of bold change, linked by periods of gradual mutation and minor variations.

Broadly we concentrate on the period from around 1700 to 1970, a span that includes a few fashion cataclysms, distinctive and readily identifiable eras such as the Regency period, and the Twenties.

But we’ve also been involved in costuming productions outside that period, for example, pre-Christian Britain, for which expertise and scrupulous research need to be combined with a greater than usual proportion of imagination and creativity

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