Dress the part: London exhibition celebrates 60 years of film and TV period costumes

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. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

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.