Page 511 - The Secret Museum

Brand new costumes, for new productions, are made on site in London. I visited

the costume department on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Royal Opera House. It was
lunchtime, and everyone was at their desk having lunch, knitting and sewing their
own things.

Judith Dore, back in Kent, tells me, ‘I think the wardrobe team are shocked to see
the different way in which I treat their costumes. To them, they are basically a
working tool.’ The costumes have to withstand enormous wear and tear while feeling
like a second skin to the dancer, and still somehow look ethereal. I think it must be
nice for the dancers to know their costumes are preserved so reverently once they are

too worn to dance in.

Theatre is about tradition, and people like to see the show that they remember
seeing, performed in the same way. Opera singers and ballerinas get superstitious
about dresses, considering famous ones to be ‘lucky’. The dress worn in Act II of
Tosca by Maria Callas is one of those dresses: singers feel the fabric contains the
essence of Callas in the iconic role. Margot Fonteyn was an exception: she didn’t
like to wear other dancers’ clothes and was the only one who wore her costumes.

Only when a production is no longer in the rep will the most iconic costumes be
taken into storage here in Kent. A costume becomes important when it is a significant

design, or from a brilliant production (like The Sleeping Beauty), or when it has
been danced in by a famous principal dancer. From then on very few people see the
costumes other than the collections exhibition team who bring items to London for
display at the Royal Opera House, or curators from other collections who ask to
borrow things.

Each piece is hung on a special hanger inside a white bag made of a soft, smooth
material called tyvek. Headdresses and accessories are on shelves. Everything is
labelled: ‘Cinderella’, ‘Accessories Box’, ‘Sleeping Beauty King’, ‘Sleeping Beauty

Queen’ …
Only one thing is kept on a mannequin. It’s a fat suit made for a rhine-maiden to

wear in a nineties’ production of Wagner’s The Ring. The fat suits weren’t popular
with the rhinemaidens because the maidens overheated – after each performance, the
suits were stored off stage with buckets underneath them to collect sweat.

The tutus are kept in boxes. The ideal way to store a tutu would be on an
individual mannequin moulded to the shape of the ballerina who wore it, but this is
too expensive and takes up too much space, so the tutus are kept in tissue paper, in
boxes. Each tutu and costume is packed in the way that is best for it.

Some are stored upside-down with the netting on top, others with the bodice on
top. Each crease is carefully packed so that it’s not sharp and won’t create a fold.

Some tutus take an hour to pack away. The collections team make puffs and rolls out
of tissue and, once they have a big pile of them, they start to pack. They use as little
tissue as possible as, over time, the tissue can stress the fabric.