Every large costume shop/storage facility that I've ever had the privilege of visiting used their own system of "internal logic." Whatever worked for the chief of the department was typically the way things went. Although I'm sure it had some organization, often it appeared to be a wilderness of free association. A few things seemed to remain constant:

Men's and Women's clothing were separated and at opposite ends of the room.    I suppose this helped the costumers with a "quick, try this on" approach. Children's costumes were sometimes in their own area, or intermixed.

Racks were then arranged by historical era. Clothes from the 1920's were separate from the 1940's, Ancient Greece kept apart from the Old West, Victorian removed from Elizabethan, etc, etc. This made it easier to locate specific sihouettes for whatever show was being cast.

Arranging clothes by size or color within these racks seemed haphazard at best. I assume this was because the costumes are continually being pulled and altered.

Fantasy or "Show Specific" costumes had an area all to themselves. For example, the wardrobes from "Beauty and the Beast" or "Alice in Wonderland" were kept as sets, each in their own special area -- presumeably for easier rentals or loaning. (This is where the "free association" aspect came in: do you put the wardrobe from "Grease" in the Show Specific area, or do you hang them back on the rack of 1950's clothes?)

I hope this gives you a small inclination of what lies ahead.   I couldn't begin to understand how accessories (shoes, hats, belts, and whatever) were stored, let alone organized.

Hey Mayo 66503!


With our community theater, just over 30 years old, we have collected a large amount of costumes over the years! Upstairs in the theater's 2nd floor we store all our props, sets, and costumes. The costumes are all on individual racks BY SHOW. Since we pull the costumes each year for a couple different shows, organizing them BY SHOW allows us to remember exactly what was worn, what time period it is, and the age of the costumes. Some of the 1660's dresses from the first time we did Moliere's aren't in such great shape, but we had more made the 2nd time we did it and those are always re-usable. Focusing on the specific show allows us to catlogue for local rental's as well without having to pull from 17 different racks to get everything someone might need together. These racks are all catalogued in huge three ring binders we keep in the office. The bottoms of all our racks have a shelf on them where jewlery, shoes, wigs and other costume related props are stored. We also have one whole room where Donations live, whether its old prom dresses, costume jewlery, costumes that don't fit anywhere else, or odds and ends, its a great room to search if you need something random or to add on to another costume. The third costume related room holds all our patters, scraps of fabric, left over trim, and any great fabric sales that we come upon. We have bolts and bolts of cloth, and some great trim/ribbon reasources that we can pull from before we go out and buy new materials. Hope this helps!

Company I worked for didn't have a HUGE inventory of costumes but they had a fair amount.  One funny story - and this is a GREAT way to purge the closet of things you'll never use again to make room for things you will - I built some really cool LIZARD or SEA CREATURE costumes for one of Edward Albee's plays (even though the actors griped the whole time they were very cool in my opinion) - but when the show was over, those costumes hung in the closet for a while UNTIL someone noticed them and then they started to be borrowed over and over and over again for parties, Halloween, other companies doing that same Albee play (Seascape) until the theater had some water damage in the basement where they were stored (a finished nice basement I might add in a new addition, new lobby, etc) and they finally got rid of them since they were part of the water damaged costumes.  But it CAN get out of hand.  And most of the time ours were NEVER organized much. Male, female, shoes, hats, coats, accessories, pants, suits, military, dresses, etc., etc.,  PRETTY basic and simple.  But then again there weren't that many to deal with.  Years ago I worked for a company who had a space rented to store them that was darn near as big as a school gymnasium.  Actually it WAS an old elementary school that has an auditorium with stage and this place was nearly PACKED with costumes.  Never saw so much stuff in my life.  Guess what?  It burned down.  ALL those costumes - up in a puff of smoke.  But then so was the theater company who went out of business nearly bankrupt.  Alas.  The way it is sometimes.

I second the notion that it's what works best for you.  I manage a community theatre costume shop that houses (and rents) 30,000 costumes.  Because we rent, our methods are sligthly different than a building costume shop or a strictly storage costume shop.

I hope it did help.  Our shop got out of hand about 15 years ago too...it was neglected to the point we thought we'd never get it sorted out again.