Costume Rental House | The ReThread Project

The ReThread Project

Preserving the Past. Dressing the Future.

The ReThread Project is bringing a world-class costume rental house back to the city—preserving history, empowering designers, and fueling the next generation of film, theater, and television storytelling.

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Initiatives / Costume Rental House

Legacy in the Making: a Dedicated Costume Rental House for New York’s Creative Community

As part of The ReThread Project’s mission to preserve and promote the art of costume design, this initiative aims to continue and grow a legacy costume rental facility in New York City—an essential resource for the East Coast’s creative community.

The house will provide designers, filmmakers, and theater professionals with access to a vast, carefully maintained, and fully digitized collection of vintage and contemporary garments spanning from the 1860s to today. By keeping this vital archive accessible within the city that has long been the heart of American costume production, The ReThread Project helps sustain both the craft and the community that make storytelling through clothing possible.

The idea is to bolster and sustain existing clothing collections as a digitized costume rental house, while building a lasting resource for our community.

Some facts about rental houses:

Los Angeles has 11 union costume rental houses - New York City has just opened its first union costume rental house.
There is only 1 rental house on the east coast that houses vintage that dates back to the 1840’s.
Most US based production is now happening inside New York and New Jersey.
15 years ago the city housed 10 working costume rental houses.

Highlights

Digitation:

Accessibility: collection can be accessed from beyond physical space saving time and travel costs for designers.
Searchability: a thorough labeling and tagging system maximizes search efficiency, both online and in warehouse.
Preservation: good documentation of garment enables important period garments to remain useful for research and learning, even if they need to be retired from the collection for fragility reasons.

Sustainability:

Accessibility: Fast fashion has a significant environmental impact. According to the UN Environment Programme, the industry is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Unfortunately, the industry’s problems are often overlooked by consumers. (source: earth.org)