Angels...

The world-famous costumiers, Angels, was opened in 1849 by Morris Angel; the original shop in Central London sold second-hand clothing and tailors’ samples, but very quickly became popular with actors who, at the time, had to buy their own clothes for auditions and performances. It was a request from these actors to hire rather than buy outfits for the duration of a performance which served as a catalyst for the launch of the costume-hiring business for which Angels is celebrated internationally to this day. With the advent of cinema, the Angel family made their second major diversification by supplying costumes to the new movie industry and by 2007 they were quite literally beginning to run out of storage space. So it was 2007 that they commissioned Bonhams, Knightsbridge , to auction off some of their more interesting items. We were lucky hear about it, and even luckier to be able to bid and thus purchase some of the costumes and having held them in pristine storage since then we feel it about time they found new homes.

The principal outfits are from “The End of the Affair” - a film starring Juianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes and directed by Neil Jordan - are now on our Shop page. These are all original outfits (some of which can be seen on the trailer) and are of exceptional quality, totally wearable - or as we had planned could be used to decorate a large room or wall!