By Travis Johnson
Clothes maketh the man – but they make the film production too, in many ways. Certain specialist productions aside, you need to clothe your actors – something that can prove to be a strain on the finances of low budget and indie efforts.
Enter Hero Frock Hire, located in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. Hero is Australia’s largest costume collection facility and specialises in renting outfits to film and television productions. Over the years, Hero has purchased or otherwise acquired pieces from a huge number of productions and collections, including clothing seen in the likes of Muriel’s Wedding, Moulin Rouge, King Kong, Dirty Deeds, The Matrix Trilogy, Ned Kelly, Australia, The Pacific, Red Dog, Cloud Street, The Sapphires, The Daughter, Peter Allen, Peter Brock, Top of the Lake and Hacksaw Ridge, and they recently supplied costuming for the ABC miniseries Friday on my Mind and the Errol Flynn biopic In Like Flynn.

Proprietor Suzy Carter actually fell into costuming by chance – she had her heart set on becoming a lighting designer but, as she explains, “…women couldn’t work in lighting in those days, so I got a traineeship in the Channel 10 costume department.”
Years later, she was working on a TV commercial and went to pick up some costumes from Max Film Studios [Beaconsfield – now apartments], where she learned that they would soon be getting rid of their entire costume collection. At the time, Sydney’s main costume hire facility, Utopia Road, had just sold their collection to Warner Bros Studio in Queensland, leaving New South Wales bereft. “We didn’t really have any costume collections left in Sydney and everyone was very upset about it,” she recalls. “I was complaining to my husband about it, and we decided we should start it [Hero Frock Hire] as a business.

Over the years, Hero’s collection has grown by leaps and bounds, mostly by donation. “We were quite radical when we started because we asked people to donate the costumes,” Carter tells us. Such a policy was one of necessity – too many costume companies went broke trying to recoup the costs of buying expensive clothing outright, and many important collections were broken up.”Because they’d paid up front for them, the hire fees were too high and nobody could recoup the money. So I just had this idea based on the Costume Collection New York, which is now called the TDF Collection. How it works in theatre in New York is everybody donates their costumes into a clothing pool and then they get them at a cheap price – so that’s what Hero was based on.”
This also means that the company operates on an environmentally sustainable model, cutting consumption by reusing and recycling wardrobe items, while Carter herself is deeply committed to the preservation of historic fashion, which is reflected in Hero’s policies.
“It was a very new concept and some productions were very happy to pass on their stock and know it would be useful,” she reflects. “But some producers just didn’t feel that was right so they didn’t choose to participate. It was a very radical concept then but sustainability is much more fashionable now so people have come around to this kind of thinking.”

CHASING SOME VINTAGE MENS CRICKET CLOTHES 1920’S
Hi Guys
My friend has quite a lot of old retro clothing that I suggested he looked to sell to a company that supplies clothing for films. It’s all 70’s- 80’s and 90’s and most of it is brand new.
Can you please tell me if this is something you look at?