NFTS bets on craft: Angels Costumes and John Gore Studios underwrite a new two-year costume design course

The National Film and Television School is going back to the wardrobe room. On 9 July 2026, the U.K.'s principal film school unveiled a new two-year costume design course, built with Angels Costumes, the London-based costume house that has dressed everything from Dickens adaptations to Marvel blockbusters, and underwritten by John Gore Studios. Three-time Oscar-winning designer Sandy Powell has signed on as patron, lending the programme the kind of prestige that no recruitment brochure can manufacture.

The arrangement is part course, part craft preservation. Costume design has long sat awkwardly between fine art and industrial logistics — closer to the wardrobe department than to the cinematographer's chair, despite routinely shaping how an audience reads a character before a line of dialogue is spoken. By tying the school's training pipeline directly to Angels' working stockrooms and to a major commercial backer, NFTS is making a bet that the next generation of screen designers will be forged in the same buildings where yesterday's tailors cut their toile.

The partners

Angels Costumes is not a glamorous name in the way that costumiers in Paris or Milan might be, but it is the working engine of British screen costume. Its warehouses hold what amounts to a national archive of screen wardrobe, available for hire across productions of every scale. The company has dressed productions from period drama to contemporary superhero films and remains the first call for many productions when the costume brief runs beyond what an in-house department can build from scratch.

John Gore Studios, the production company founded by the impresario John Gore, brings the money. The company operates across theatre, live entertainment and film, and its investment in a training pipeline reflects a quieter argument: that the talent base for screen production is ageing out faster than it is being replaced. NFTS, based at Beaconsfield Studios in Buckinghamshire, supplies the institutional home, the teaching staff and the academic credential.

Why Sandy Powell matters

Sandy Powell's involvement is the headline. Powell has won three Academy Awards for Best Costume Design — for Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator and The Young Victoria — and has been nominated a further nine times, the kind of record that places her among the most decorated screen designers of her generation regardless of nationality. She has worked repeatedly with Martin Scorsese, Todd Haynes and Jane Campion, and her hand is visible across productions where period detail functions less as decoration than as argument.

A patron of Powell's stature changes what the course can claim to teach. NFTS's pitch is not simply that students will learn to drape, cut and source; it is that they will be trained by an institution with standing in the field and shaped by a designer whose judgment the industry already trusts. Whether Powell will teach directly, or merely lend her name and periodic critique, is a detail the announcement does not specify.

The structural frame

Film education in Britain has spent the better part of two decades caught between two pressures. The first is industrial: the U.K. screen sector has grown rapidly on the back of high-end television and streaming-era production, but the supporting crafts — costume, hair and makeup, prosthetic design, set dressing — have not always been rewarded with the same graduate pipelines that cinematography and directing have enjoyed. The second is academic: tuition fees, visa conditions and the slow erosion of arts funding have made sustained craft training harder to sustain as a self-standing programme.

The Angels-NFTS arrangement is a response to both pressures at once. By drawing on the working stock of a costume house rather than asking students to build a wardrobe from scratch, the course compresses what would otherwise be years of freelance entry-level work into a taught curriculum. By tying the funding to a private studio rather than to a public grant cycle, it insulates the programme from the budgetary churn that has disrupted other U.K. screen-training initiatives. Whether other crafts — prosthetic design, hair and makeup, armoury — follow the same template is one of the more interesting open questions in British film education.

Stakes and open questions

The course launches at a moment when British costume departments are busier than they have been in years, but also when the cost of training a craftsperson to industry standard has risen sharply. Angels itself has been candid in industry settings about the difficulty of recruiting young designers willing to apprentice inside a working wardrobe for the wages the early years of the job typically pay.

What remains to be seen is whether the course will become a genuine talent pipeline or a branded showcase. The former requires sustained work placements, industry hiring commitments and the unglamorous logistics of fitting rooms and transport between Beaconsfield and Angels' west London facility. The latter requires only a press release, a patron's name and a graduating cohort whose subsequent careers may or may not trace back to the course. The signatories have signalled they understand which of the two outcomes matters; the next two years will show whether the rest of the industry agrees.

How Monexus framed this: the Variety exclusive was treated as the sole wire of record. Every named partner, the course duration and Powell's patron role are drawn from that report; questions the announcement does not answer — including whether Powell will teach directly — are flagged rather than filled in.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_and_Television_School
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_Costumes