The Fire and The Future of Our Wardrobe.

As most of you have probably heard, on December 22nd we got a phone call. Our wardrobe building had caught fire and burned through most the night. (Thankfully the warehouse only housed our wardrobe and our main location was not affected.) At first we were hopeful that the damage and losses would be minimal, but after we had a chance to go through everything we concluded that we lost about 70% of our collection. Among the losses were most of our accessories, 70% of our hats, almost all our personal supplies and multiple shelves worth of clothing. Unfortunately, we lost some irreplaceable collections of military and western clothes. But for some good news, many of you will be glad to hear that we were able to salvage our collection from Dances with Wolves! While some of the damage was from the actual fire burning things up, most of it was actually caused by heat, tar that melted off the ceiling, smoke and water damage. As I’m sure you could imagine, the plastic hangers that most of our clothes were hanging on did not react well to the heat. They melted, leaving piles of wet clothes to freeze on the floor. The aftermath left us with hours of clean up and of decision making on what was salvageable and what wasn’t.

While the task of cleaning up, reorganizing, and regaining our collection is a large one, we are very hopeful that this is only a detour. We are excited to continue to give our customers a place to shop for wardrobe— in fact we have BIG plans for the future. We expect to be moving to an entirely new location in the near future. There, our wardrobe section will be about more than just housing clothes. We plan to add amenities that serve those who work in wardrobe in the film industry. On-site laundry, a dyeing center, and a workspace are all on the list. The project of moving locations will be a great for us as well as the for community, so we are anxious to get started.

In the meantime, many of you have reached out offering your time and resources to help. We are so grateful for our awesome community that is always ready to help us when we need it. We do look forward to working with the industry to eventually rebuild our collection as well as give you all an opportunity to offer your time if the need arises. Thank you to everyone who has reached out, and be on the look out for big things happening at The Prop House!