Exhibition: Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop

Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop opens at Dovecot Studios on 18 July 2026 and runs through to 16 January 2027, taking over the North and South Galleries. It's a look back at six decades of Cosprop, the London costume house that's been dressing period film, television and theatre since 1965.

If you've spent any time watching period drama, you've seen their work without knowing it. Cosprop was founded by Oscar and BAFTA-winning costume designer John Bright, and they've spent sixty years specialising in the kind of historical detail that makes a setting feel lived-in rather than like a fancy dress party. The exhibition brings together costumes, accessories and sketches from their archive, with pieces from A Room with a View, Out of Africa, Downton Abbey, Pride and Prejudice and Mrs Harris Goes to Paris. You'll see the actual clothes worn by Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View, Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey, Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and Leslie Manville in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.

It's not just the finished costumes on display, either. The show pairs them with design drawings, research material, mood boards, fabric swatches and archive photography, so you can trace the whole process from the first script to the final screen. Many of the costumes have never been seen in public before, and seeing them alongside the sketches and research gives you a proper sense of how a character's look is built from the ground up. The whole thing is accompanied by a book, The Costume House: The Inside Story of Cosprop, written by former V&A film curator Keith Lodwick with a foreword by Dame Judi Dench.

Tickets are £13.50, with concessions from £6.75 to £12, and the exhibition runs from 18 July 2026 to 16 January 2027 at Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh EH1 1LT.