TV Costume Departments Aid Coronavirus Fight

Costume departments for major productions from around the world have come up with resourceful ways to help in the ongoing battle against COVID-19. 

Props departments and companies have been pulling together internally to make and donate makeshift PPE equipment for essential workers to use during the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.

The golden compass 

The team behind TV series His Dark Materials has pivoted to making plastic face shields for medics on the frontline and to also produce medical scrubs, with the initiative titled Helping Dress Medics. 

Approximately 6,500 scrubs have been made so far or are in the process of being developed by the team, whose credits include Poldark, Downton Abbey and Sex Education. The group is in the process of fundraising to do even more. 

“This should make things quicker, keep costs down and ideally keep any risk of contagion to a minimum,” the team said in their fundraising statement.

“We are liaising with hospital staff directly in the areas we live and taking advice from them about what they need so that we can specifically help them. The nature of how the virus is spread means that the demand for scrubs is especially high.”

Changing the dynamic 

Madrid-based entity Peris Costumes with high-end production credits including The Crown, The Young Pope and Vikings donated protective gear to key workers across Europe with everything from face masks to full body costumes used in award-winning series Chernobyl. 

“We decided first to check what we had in our warehouses, which have a lot of things which are useful coming from different series and productions,” said CEO Javier Toledo. 

“Once we found all that we could donate for protection, we decided to use our workshops to produce masks, aprons and other clothes that could help healthcare workers.”

For this production [Chernobyl], we bought a lot of plastic protections. Real costumes for protection and [we’re] lucky we had this so we could help. We donated everything.

“Not only that, but also face covers and everything we could find in our stocks – shoes, and even materials used in real life by doctors and nurses.” 

With many companies looking to capitalize commercially on the shortage of PPE equipment it’s certainly a change-of-pace for groups in the entertainment industry to be focusing on donations rather than profits, especially when a lot of businesses have had to reposition themselves to keep up in this unprecedented pandemic.