Britain is a country which has failed to say "Goodbye" and pay tribute to its erstwhile 'Queen of Costume Design', Anne Gainsford

Anne, who is listed in IMBD as the 'costume designer' for the ground-breaking television series 'The Avengers', which ran for 161 episodes from 1961 to 1967, died in March this year. During that time she worked closely with the director, producers and other key creatives to see to it that the costumes enhanced aura of modern espionage in Britain in the 'Swinging Sixties'. 

This was particularly evident in the costumes of the character Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg, whose wardrobe of mini skirts and leather catsuits resonated with the times and turned show into a prominent fashion icon. (link) Yet despite this, Anne's passing in March this year went unheralded, save a brief obituary written by her goddaughter, Georgina Palffy in the Guardian newspaper.  

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Anne was born in Lincolnshire in the district of Horncastle in the winter of 1934, the daughter of Helen and Alfred John Gainsford who was Managing Director of Birley Collieries in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and was the cousin of William Dunn Gainsford, the owner of the collieries. Consequently, Anne and her younger brother John had a privileged childhood, witness by the fact that Somersby House, where she was born, had been the rectory where Alfred, Lord Tennyson had been born seventy-five years before.

Anne was five years old when the Second World War broke out and she was evacuated to the to the Presentation Sisters Convent School in Matlock, Derbyshire run by a Roman Catholic order of nuns founded in Ireland, which had established the school and had been involved in educational and charitable work in the area for many years. She stayed there as a boarder until 1945 when, at the age of eleven, she moved to the Roman Catholic St Mary’s School, Ascot. It had around 200 pupils and a religious community of 60, by the mid-1950s, under the leadership of Reverend Mother Cecilia Marshall as Provincial Superior. 

At the age of eighteen Anne gained a place at Oxford University and in 1952 started her history undergraduate degree course at Lady Margaret Hall. It was an all-women's college founded in 1878 that played a significant role in women's education at a time when women were still breaking barriers in accessing higher education and were certainly, still breaking barriers in the 1950s. 

It was a paper she read on the Italian Renaissance that captured her interest and led Anne to Perugia after she graduated in 1955 where she, no doubt visited the Collegio del Cambio. Here she followed her next great passion, 'opera' and perhaps more importantly, learnt to speak Italian. This certainly helped her greatly a decade later when she worked for the Italian film director, Franco Zeffirelli. No doubt the thirteen years she had spent in the tightly organised world of  private, boarding school education in the hands of catholic nuns helped to provide her for the future the disciplined and highly organised worlds of theatre and film.

On her return to England and still in he early twenties  she joined The Slade School of Fine Art as a student where she explored various artistic disciplines, including stage design, often within a broader context of theatre design studies. 

While the Slade didn't specialize in stage design, it provided a foundation for students who later worked in theatre, like Kenneth MacMillan, who saw a connection between colour, music, rhythm, and choreography. In fact, Anne herself was part of an extraordinary generation of young designers emerging from the Slade in the 1950s.

 Having graduated from the Slade in the late 1950s, she worked as a scene painter for Disley Jones at the Lyric Hammersmith on 'The Demon Barber' in 1959. He was described by The Guardian on his death in 2005 as : 'A theatrical polymath, bursting with informed and idiosyncratic ideas on text, performance and direction; moreover, at any moment he would unhesitatingly take up a hammer or paintbrush and work through the night to put the show on'.

In the 1960s she moved to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon and work in repertory theatre. Then in 1961 she got her big career break when she became the costume designer for ABC Weekend TV, a contractor within the ITV network and worked on the espionage series, 'The Avengers'. 

She benefited from the fact that, as a free lancer it was possible for her to work in TV, film and theatre for different clients concurrently. This meant that in 1964 she worked 'Design Assistant' on Franco Zeffirelli's Italian production of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet', performed at the Teatro Romano in Verona which featured his innovative staging and visual approach that had been presented in his 1960 Old Vic production. 

Juggling multiple demands bore testimony to Anne's strong organisational and time-management skills because, as Zeffirelli's Design Assistant, she would have been involved in anything from set design to costume design and because he was known for his elaborate and visually stunning productions she would have played a crucial role in bringing his artistic vision to life. This involved tasks like researching historical clothing, creating clothing sketches and co-ordinating with costume makers.

When she just turned thirty in 1967 she worked on her first film, Zeffirelli's 'The Taming of the Shrew', starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In this she supervised the design of the costumes by Danilo Donati, with those of Kate and Petruchio portraying wealth and power through their rich fabrics and detailed embellishments. (link)

It was in 1967 that Anne, with fellow designer, Patti Pope, who specialised as a theatrical hatter set up her own company, the Richmond Studio. Here Patti or  'Patricia', designed the helmet, now in the V & A, used by an actor in the production, 'The Twelfth Rose' Ballet for All in the Swan Theatre, Worcester in 1969. While Anne carved out a niche making headgear for opera and ballet as demonstrated by her work in 'Aida' in 1968 at the Royal Opera House. Here she produced the headdresses for the character of A Priestess in Act I of the Covent Garden Opera Company production of 'Aida' in 1968 at the Royal Opera House and also for the character Amneris in Acts III and IV.

In 1968 she undertook her second film as Costume Designer for 'Inadmissible Evidence', a 1968 British drama film directed by Anthony Page and starring Nicol Williamson and Jill Bennett. John Osborne had written the screenplay, adapting his own 1964 play. The film portrays the collapse of an angry but sad man who cannot maintain decent standards in his life and antagonises everybody. 

In 1971 Anne was the Costume Designer in 'Murphy's War' directed by Peter Yates, with Disley Jones as Production Designer. It starred Peter O'Toole and was set in Venezuela during Second World War, a crewman survivor of a sunken merchant ship. O'Toole was consumed in his quest for revenge and retribution against the Nazi German submarine that sank his ship and slaughtered the survivors. Anne's costume skills were set to work on the attire of O'Toole and period naval attire of Horst Janson as the U-Boat captain. 

In 1978 she was the Costume Designer on the film 'Absolution', a British thriller directed by Anthony Page and written by playwright Anthony Shaffer. Anne worked alongside other crew members like Freddie Williamson for makeup and Betty Glasow for hairstyling. It starred Richard Burton as a priest who taught at a boys' school and found one of his favourite students was playing a nasty practical joke on him and also featured Billy Connolly. Burton set out to investigate the prank and stumbled upon a dead body, leading to his life spiralling out of control. (link)

From 1983 onwards her work was mainly in connection with the internationally recognised Period Costume House, 'Cosprop', founded in 1965 by John Bright.

In her private life Anne had some tempestuous relationships, the most notable was and affair with the author, Sybille Bedford who she met at PEN international. 

In her book about Sybille, 'An Appetite for Life' Selina Hastings wrote : 'Sybille embarked on another affair, with Anne Gainsford, a talented costume designer for films and theatre'. After one of their first nights together, Sybille confided to Lesley Black that "I had again that sense of tenderness and lovingness … an immense feeling not only towards that woman here and now whom I have unaccountably come to love so much, but love tout court". Lesley was Sybille's confidant in the affair who said that after a fortnight in Ireland, Sybille remained infatuated, like ‘a crazy, obsessed teenager’. On one occasion Sybille accompanied Anne to the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket, where Anne was delivering some costumes, Sybille enthralled by her first sight of an auditorium from the wings, amazed by the steep rake of the stage. Not long after they met Sybille gave Anne a gold brooch, but when the affair ended she asked for it to be returned.  

From the 1990s onwards Anne became renowned for her accurate creation of historical top hats and she insisted on using period techniques and materials, sewing black on black, even as her sight deteriorated. In 1996 she made top hats for the Die Meistersinger at the Royal Danish Opera and the wearers can be seen holding her creations in front of them.

In 1992 in the American superhero film 'Batman Returns', Danny DeVito played Oswald Cobblepot, also known as 'The Penguin', a deformed orphan abandoned by his wealthy parents and raised by penguins in the Gotham City sewers. The Penguin wore the top hat which Anne designed in numerous scenes as part of his ‘respectable’ guise as the mayoral candidate for Gotham. Made from black felt and finished with a black silk hatband and bow, the hat featured a cream-coloured silk lining with a chamois leather protective strip around the lower portion. 'Danny DeVito' was written in black marker on a name tag at the back, beneath which was printed 'Anne Gainsford at the Richmond Studio'. (link)

Seven years later she was commissioned to create a topper for Ralph Fiennes who played Onegin in the 1999 British-American romantic drama film based on Alexander Pushkin's 1833 novel in verse 'Eugene Onegin'. She had to make sure that Ralph's topper was accurate for Russia in the 1820s. (link)

In 2004 it was time to produce a top hat for Johnny Depp in 'Finding Neverland'. Set in 1903, following the dismal reception of his latest play Sir James Barrie meets the widowed Sylvia and her four young sons in Kensington Gardens. A strong friendship develops among them and Barrie proves to be a great playmate and surrogate father figure for the boys, and their imaginative antics give him ideas that he incorporates into a play about boys who do not want to grow up, in particular one named after troubled young Peter Llewelyn Davies. In his persona as a circus ringmaster his costume, was designed by Alexandra Byrne, with a period-accurate ensemble with a pink/red velvet tailcoat, a gold waistcoat and star-motif trousers. Anne's top hat was made of black plush. (link)

As a girl, having been born in Lord Tennyson's house, she was captivated by his poem, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' and when troops were stationed near St Mary’s School, Ascot where she was a boarder in the Second World War, her lifelong interest soldiers' dress was ignited. In 1952, when she was eighteen, she staked out the Musée de l'Armée and was thrilled by Napoleon's chapeaux and Revolution and Empire uniforms. That being the case, she was no doubt delighted to be given the commission to make the bicorne hats for 'Master and Commander' the film which starred Russell Crowe as Aubrey, a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. (link)

According to her goddaughter, Georgina Palffy, although she never retired, when work dried up Anne learned to restore furniture, devoted herself to her very English garden in Richmond upon Thames, and enjoyed visiting historical houses with a string of eager acolytes.