Sixty Years of Cosprop
ALISON BUCHANAN
John Bright OBE, award winning costume designer and founder of the Bright Foundation, is a source of inspiration for many. His costume and prop house, Cosprop, specialising in period costumes, has provided costumes for some of the world’s finest actors and directors and has a well-deserved reputation for careful research, impeccable attention to detail and a high level of craftsmanship. Cosprop has been celebrating sixty years in business with a unique exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, one of the museum’s most popular exhibitions opened last September and ends 8 March. Visit fashiontextilemuseum.org/ for details.
From early successes with Merchant Ivory such as Maurice and Room with a View, Cosprop have created costumes and collaborated with designers to create memorable outfits for characters such as Captain Jack Sparrow and Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, and for a wide range of films, theatre productions and television series all focused on period costume mostly from the 18th to the mid-20th century.
John knows the importance of authenticity: “Actors walk into Cosprop with just a script and the name of their character. They walk out with that character forming in their mind, having brought him or her to life through the angle of a hat, the fabric of a coat or the feel of a pair of shoes.”
Marianne Dashwood’s wedding dress in Sense and Sensibility
Cosprop holds tens of thousands of individual pieces, and John won an Oscar and a BAFTA with co-designer Jenny Beavan OBE for Room With A View in 1987. Cosprop has collaborated with many outstanding designers over the years including recent successes such as Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders.
With a passion for creativity, the arts and equality, John set up the The Bright Foundation in 2018 to give children and young people locally an opportunity to explore and develop their creative skills, primarily serving those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The latest production, The Ballad of Red and the Wilding Wolf, created for his performance space, The Barn Theatre, just outside Hastings, will be shown free to local schools and to the general public later in the year. The Foundation also uses the Benbow Arts Space in St Leonards for creative programmes and is hosting a fundraising table sale of fabrics on Sunday 1 March.
Visit thebrightfoundation.org.uk/whats-on for more details.
Costumes and fashion can elevate a film from the ordinary to the extraordinary. HIP asked Julia Andrews-Clifford, Creative Director at The Electric Palace, for some of her favourite clothes in film: “I’m an admirer of John’s work and love films like Breathless (1960), Funny Face (1957) and Cruella (2021) – all quite different films where the clothes really stand out.”
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