Theaterkunst – the Berlin wardrobe where Hollywood gets into character

The leafy Berlin suburb of Wilmersdorf is an unlikely place to imagine the Hollywood elite. And yet, for more than half a century, Germany’s leading costume house, Theaterkunst, has been drawing stars to this distinctly unflashy corner of the city. With a collection of about 10 million pieces, it’s one of the oldest and largest of its kind. 

With a list of credits that spans Weimar-era silent films and Marvel superhero smashes, Theaterkunst – which has occupied a former dairy in the neighbourhood since the 1950s – has worked on industry-defining movies throughout the history of cinema. And it’s still very much in its stride – two of the Best Picture nominees at this year’s Academy Awards, Poor Things and The Zone of Interest, worked with the company to kit out their cast.

“It’s a wonderful place with a great, old soul,” says costume designer Lisy Christl, thumbing intently through densely packed racks in search of the perfect orange T-shirt. “I’ve been coming here for almost 30 years.” Christl has collaborated with Theaterkunst on projects for Terrence Malick and Michael Haneke; for Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front, she worked with the in-house atelier to create costumes that included a set of pyjamas for a character played by Daniel Brühl. The pink-striped two-piece today adorns a mannequin in the entranceway to Theaterkunst’s menswear department, alongside other mannequins, including one wearing a blue velvet dress from the 1920s worn by Hunter Schafer in the latest Hunger Games. 

Theaterkunst began life in 1907, set up by a group of young entrepreneurs as theatres and cabarets were springing up around the prospering German capital. Business really took off in 1918 when Hermann J Kaufmann, one of the original co-founders, assumed sole ownership and started making costumes for Germany’s burgeoning film industry, working on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and dressing Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. It also worked on the 1925 silent version of Ben-Hur, employing some 350 costumiers to create everything from headgear and shoes to swords and spears. The project involved seven tons of leather, and lead actor Ramon Novarro famously took a two week-long voyage by ship from New York to Germany just for his fitting.  

If you laid out all their clothing end to end, it would run to more than 6km

The costume house went on to open offices in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, London, New York and Stockholm. After the Nazi party assumed power in 1933, however, Kaufmann, who was Jewish, was forced to sell the company in 1936. The premises on the central Berlin street of Orianienburger Strasse were bombed twice during the war, destroying much of the archive. Following Germany’s defeat and subsequent division, Theaterkunst was also split in two. The GDR branch didn’t survive more than a few  years, but its counterpart flourished along with the German Economic Miracle, providing costumes for all of the biggest films in the country’s postwar history, working with Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

Posters from these films now decorate the walls in the Wilmersdorf HQ, which is divided over five storeys: the basement houses shoes and weaponry, the ground floor is dedicated to menswear and the top three store womenswear. Sections are subdivided by era, and then divided again according to occasion. A stroll around the first floor, for example, takes visitors between rails of mink stoles, technicolour polyester party dresses from the 1970s, a selection of children’s Lederhosen and every variety of apron. One whole wall is dedicated to traditional headwear and another to gloves, with boxes marked “sporty”, “fingerless” and “lace”. 

This was especially valuable to Malgorzata Karpiuk, costume designer for The Zone of Interest. “There was one huge party scene where we needed to dress 400 extras,” she says. “I went to Theaterkunst because I knew it had the most amazing collection of period costumes. And I found all these beautiful dresses and tuxedos from the 1930s and ’40s.” 

Karpiuk has been working with Theaterkunst since the start of her career. “I think I first came here when I was an assistant. We were making a commercial and needed Louis XIV-era clothes.” Today, she sees her visits as important research trips. “I use Theaterkunst a bit like a library. When I was designing the custom Lederhosen that the children wear in The Zone of Interest, I took inspiration from everything I had seen in their archive.” It’s not just costume designers who use Theaterkunst’s services. “We get some of the world’s leading high-fashion brands sending teams here,” says project coordinator Svea Sanyó. “Unfortunately we’re not allowed to name them.”

In 2009, Theaterkunst expanded into the two Wilmersdorf warehouses: if you laid out all their racks of clothing end to end, it would stretch for more than 6km. A project is underway to replace the handwritten index cards that currently catalogue the collection with digital chips – no mean feat considering there are more than 10 million items. Each piece is being fitted with a digital chip to replace the handwritten index cards.

The warehouses mainly store Theaterkunst’s collection of uniforms, their speciality. “It’s very important that we dress these uniforms correctly,” says Sanyó. “There are a lot of film-watchers waiting eagle-eyed to spot any historical inaccuracies. We need to know everything, from which exact button went on which jacket to which direction the stripes went on a US tie versus a European one.”

They also have access to a reference library, with more than 4,500 books on costume history and uniform design, spanning everything from London’s fire brigades to fighters in the American Revolution.

Managing director Andrea Peters was brought in in 2021 “to really push international business”; something, she says, that has become increasingly important as Germany struggles to sell itself as a lucrative production hub. “Locations like Hungary and Romania have become very attractive for Hollywood because of their tax incentive programmes, which mean they can get up to 45 per cent of their costs back. We don’t have anything like that in Germany.” (A new incentive is apparently planned for 2025.) To combat declining local business, Theaterkunst has set up satellite offices in Warsaw, Vienna, Prague and Budapest.

Yet some filmmakers have stayed loyal to Germany. Wes Anderson was recently a 30-minute drive away at Studio Babelsberg filming his latest feature, The Phoenician Scheme. Theaterkunst were called in to help supply costumes. “Our atelier works on a very high level,” says Peters. “We only have three people working there so we’re not producing clothing for extras on an industrial scale, like some facilities do.” For added authenticity, its small team sews clothing from vintage fabrics and draws from an extensive archive of sewing patterns and old fashion magazines.

For Peters, it’s important that the company carefully considers how it grows. “Costume designers know they can come here for historical pieces, but they might look elsewhere for contemporary styles. We want to change that.” Earlier this year, Theaterkunst launched the 1907 Curated initiative, which involves working with young, Berlin-based designers, such as Daniela Harsch and Helena Sölting, to add new pieces to their range. “Customers are able to rent them, mostly for music videos and advertising but also for film and television. It’s also a good opportunity for these young brands to get more visibility.”  

As the threat of AI looms large over the filmmaking industry, does Peters worry that Theaterkunst’s distinctly analogue way of working might be under threat? “I don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years”, she says. “We don’t want to bury our heads in the sand and pretend the world isn’t changing, so we are thinking about collaborating with companies in the field of digital effects.” For a company that’s already survived two world wars and overcome so many challenges over the course of its history, it seems unlikely that this will prove the final hurdle for Theaterkunst.