If you are interested in finding out how costume designers bring movie characters to life, then make sure you don’t miss out on the V&A's Hollywood Costume exhibition.

The V&A's autumn exhibition explores the central role costume design plays in cinema storytelling. Costume designers are true storytellers, historians, social commentators and anthropologists while movies are about people, and costume design plays a vital role in bringing these people to life. 'Hollywood Costume' illuminates the costume designer’s process in the creation of character from script to screen including the changing social and technological context in which they have worked over the last century.

You will learn all about the creative process behind the clothes on the silver screen as this ground-breaking exhibition includes over 100 of the most iconic and unforgettable film characters from a century of Hollywood filmmaking, 1912–2012. 'Hollywood Costume' takes us on a three-gallery journey from Charlie Chaplin through the Golden Age of Hollywood to the cutting-edge design for 'Avatar’ and 'John Carter of Mars'.

Hollywood Costumes displays items from previously unseen archives, special interview footage and case studies to illustrate how film characters get their look. These galleries are filled with cinema costumes that have never left the private and archival collections in California. Most of these clothes have never been publicly displayed and have never been seen beyond the secure walls of the studio archives.

Focusing on the creative process of the costume designer, including how they interact with a film's director and actors, this glamorous exhibition is split into three parts – Act 1 Deconstruction, Act 2 Dialogue and Act 3 Finale.

The exhibition ends with a bang, as visitors enter a "Glamorous Hollywood Nightclub" which is filled with familiar film characters. This celebration of heroes and villains shall include Sugar Kane Kowalczyk, Holly Golightly, Dorothy Gale, Indiana Jones, Scarlett O'Hara, Jack Sparrow, Darth Vader and Roxie Hart, alongside characters from the Matrix and Twilight. 

The Exhibition runs from 20th October 2012 to 27th January 2013.