Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak comes in several different formats to help create its movie magic (Picture: Tori Brazier)
Hermione’s Time-Turner could have allowed us even longer in the archive… (Picture: Tori Brazier)
Some pieces need boxed storage and others don’t (Picture: Tori Brazier)
The archive’s location is kept tightly under wraps due to the interest and value of what it holds. However, the staff regularly ship items across the globe and have specific ways of doing so safely.
Radcliffe’s costumes take over almost an entire bottom rail of one of the archive’s full rows, and 22 bays in full. There’s everything from the (tiny!) red jumper he wore in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone when gazing into the Mirror or Erised, to his different Triwizard Tournament uniforms from the three tasks in Goblet of Fire, and the disguise he wears to break into the Ministry of Magic alongside Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1.
‘A lot of the costumes would have been sourced from just high street stores like Uniqlo and Gap, things that don’t look super stylish or expensive. They’re quite generic so you can’t pin them to a specific time period, which makes the films feel quite timeless,’ Crane explains.
There are plenty of what appear, at first, to be rather dirty costumes in bad condition too, reflecting the adventurous nature of Harry’s escapades – but this is all movie magic and ‘stage dirt’.
‘We have them treated to make sure the costumes are clean, but they are supposed to look like they’ve fallen down a bathroom sewer, so they’re meant to be all dirty and torn!’ Crane says as she shows us Harry’s costume from the Chamber of Secrets scene.
The senior coordinator – who herself appeared as a Ravenclaw extra in the final few Potter films and serendipitously came across her original costume when sorting through items for the archive – also tells us about the multiples some costumes must be produced in, to accurately depict various stages of breakdown.
There’s almost a full bay dedicated to Harry’s beige cord jacket and outfit he wears for the majority of the Deathly Hallows – Part 2.
‘This is quite an iconic costume, you’ll see it on all the posters for the last Harry Potter film, he’s wearing it for a fair chunk of it, and what I like about this costume is that we have different stages of breakdown for it, so it’s the same costume but we’ll have multiple versions and some will be a little holey and some will be very damaged,’ Crane shares.