Hollywood costumes play starring role in exhibition

For exhibition designer Roger Mann and his team at Casson Mann, the biggest challenge behind their stunning new show "Hollywood Costumes", at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, was to make the clothes look as animated as they do on the big screen.

So they (naturally) looked to the movie world for inspiration and came up with the idea of using "living portrait" videos - like those that line the walls of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies - clipped onto a tripod above each costume in the exhibition.

"It proved rather difficult, but we wanted to create the sense of costumes being inhabited by actors, and coming alive," says Mann, the creative director.

It worked. The combination of digital media and iconic film costumes bring to life one of the V&A's most ambitious shows, to date.

It took five years for the curator, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, to track down and cajole collectors, film studios and actors to lend their costumes for the exhibition. It helped that she is the wife of film director John Landis and herself a respected costume designer for such noted films as Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Blues Brothers as well as Michael Jackson's Thriller video.

There are 130 costumes on show including iconic items such as Audrey Hepburn's little black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charlie Chaplin's shabby suit, Johnny Depp's outfit from Pirates of the Caribbean and Vivien Leigh's green "curtain" dress designed by Walter Plunkett for Gone with the Wind.