Where Are Thousands of Movie Hats Stored?

Jerry Gault

Aug 3

3 min read

Behind Hollywood’s Hats

If a costume designer suddenly needs a 1940s fedora, a Victorian bonnet, or twenty matching cowboy hats, where do they start looking?

There is no single warehouse holding all of Hollywood’s hats.

Montgomery Clift between takes during the filming of Red River in 1946. Photograph: Monterey Productions/United Artists, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Working Libraries, Not Museums

Some studios keep their own costume collections. Large independent costume houses also rent clothing, hats, shoes, jewelry, and other accessories to productions. These places are not really museums. They are closer to enormous working libraries, except almost everything inside can be worn.

Western Costume Company in Los Angeles says it has eight miles of rental stock, covering clothing and accessories from many different periods. Costume teams can search its departments for hats, gloves, handbags, shoes, jewelry, and the rest of a character’s wardrobe.

Warner Bros. maintains a large costume-rental collection in Burbank, while Universal also rents costumes for film, television, commercials, and photography. A designer searching for the right hat may therefore look through studio collections, independent costume houses, specialist suppliers, or pieces made especially for the production.

Finding One Hat Among Thousands

But how does anyone find one particular hat among thousands?

The exact systems are not always described publicly, and each company may organize its collection differently. The basic problem, however, is the same. A working costume collection must be arranged so that items can be found, examined, fitted, rented, returned, and reused.

Angels Costumes in London gives a useful example. The company says its collection contains more than one million items and eight miles of hanging costumes. Clothing is arranged by historical period, with men’s and women’s garments from the same era kept near each other. Hats are stored close by, letting designers build a complete look without searching a separate part of the building.

From Warehouse to Wardrobe Trailer

Once a hat is chosen for a production, it may leave the main warehouse and move into a preparation area, costume truck, or wardrobe trailer. The Costume Designers Guild has described these trailers as a combination of office, closet, laundry room, and storage space. During filming, this is often where costumes are organized, checked, and kept ready for the actors.

Rental Stock and Archives Serve Different Purposes

A working costume warehouse, however, is not the same as an archive.

A rental hat is still expected to do a job. It may be handled, tried on, altered, shipped, returned, and rented again. An archival hat is stored mainly to protect its history and physical condition.

Museums take extra care to keep stored hats from losing their shape. A fragile hat may rest on a padded support or be placed in a box that keeps away dust and reduces handling. Light, insects, pollution, temperature, and humidity all have to be watched as well, because each can slowly damage the materials.

For many costume accessories, the Canadian Conservation Institute recommends keeping humidity between about 45 and 55 percent and the temperature at or below 21°C, or 70°F. Those are museum-style preservation targets, though, and they should not be taken to mean that every working costume warehouse maintains those conditions throughout the building.

A frequently rented hat and an irreplaceable screen-worn artifact serve very different purposes. One needs to remain available for work. The other may be preserved because it can never truly be replaced.

A movie hat may appear on screen for only a few minutes, then spend years waiting on a shelf or rack, resting on a form, or sitting inside a box until someone needs it again.

Which would you rather explore: the busy aisles of a working costume house or the carefully controlled rooms of a film archive?