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Viking hoards: the armour room

These days the company is still family-run, with fifth generation and ex-BAFTA chairman Tim at the helm and 32-year-old daughter Emma in charge of the fancy dress business, including the burgeoning website (www.fancydress .com). Meanwhile, her brother Daniel is the business logistics manager. All the sons of the Angel family have been called Morris or Daniel (Tim’s middle name is Morris).

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The film and TV hire side of the firm moved to Hendon five years ago from Camden. The Shaftesbury Avenue building had already been given over to the fancy dress side of things, but the Victorian Camden building wasn’t suitable for such a large, modern business, with staff forever running up and down the stairs to find things. When Angels bought costumier Bermans in 1992, taking on even more stock, it was just too much. The new warehouse seems purpose-built, although it wasn’t. The workrooms where the costumes get made are full of natural light, while the windowless room given over to the large collection of period fur coats and stoles is kept refrigerated to ward off moths and other bugs (the rest of the huge collection is fumigated monthly). Customers from the industry moaned at the change of location initially but, in fact, they’re handily close to Shepperton, Elstree and Pinewood Studios.

Angels also has a long and distinguished involvement with the military and made officers’ uniforms for WWI and WWII. On the fictional side, in addition to ‘Dad’s Army’ costumes (John Le Mesurier’s Sergeant Wilson and Clive Dunn’s Corporal Jones uniforms will be among a selection in the auction), the Hendon warehouse has a whole area devoted to military garb. I ask a passing costumier about a certain blue uniform I don’t recognise. ‘First World War French,’ he replies immediately. Not just every conflict is represented here, but every rank, of every nationality, in every state of repair from deliberately battle-torn and dirty, to pressed and pristine. If a new costume does have to be created by the in-house team, it takes them 22 days to complete it – with seven days for the cutting alone. Next to the endless racks of clothes is a small reference library filled with bound copies of La Mode Illustration and the Illustrated London News – invaluable resources for costumiers trying to avoid anachronism. Inside, the precise line drawings help them work out how a dress or hat might have been put together. Old portraits are more tricky because artists often focused on faces and not on the detail of a costume – like tabloid photographers today. Just as the famous Lemuel Abbot painting of Admiral Nelson neglects to show the detail of his naval medals, costumiers making Helen Mirren’s outfits for ‘The Queen’ pored over hours of footage of the real Queen, cursing the cameramen for homing in on her face when they really needed to see the back of her hat.

The crowns and jewellery room is aptly named. There are crowns, tiaras, chokers and even sceptres in here, as well as rows of neat white drawers housing every kind of spectacle, from delicate pince-nez to thick NHS-style frames and mirrored aviator sunglasses. Displayed in its full glory is the original feathered headdress used in ‘Octopussy’ (1983), and again a decade later by Annie Lennox on the cover of her ‘Diva’ album.

The colourful spoils in this building on a grey day, in a rather bleak corner of north-west London, provide enchanting contrast. But the people behind Angels don’t mind when their fantastic costumes go unnoticed onscreen. As Tim Angel says, ‘I thought the costumes in a film like “Infamous” were excellent, but most people who saw it probably didn’t notice them. That’s because, in their subtle way, they were perfect.’