Inside Heidi Hollywood’s wild costume kingdom in Krugersdorp

Some people dream of castles. Heidi du Toit built one, literally. It’s on the main road of Krugersdorp’s CBD.

Inside, it’s a fantasy land of fabric, feathers, high fashion, sequins, props, strange funkiness, and latex.

It’s a collection of four decades in fashion and thirty years running Hollywood Costumes. It’s a refuge and a muse house for the imagination.

Du Toit lives her dream every day.

“I knew what I wanted to be since I was a little girl,” she said. “My mom was a fashion designer, and I used to love paging through her pattern books. I always knew I was going to do this.”

She grew up in Welkom, studied fashion design, and eventually turned her passion into a business that now straddles both sides of the road.

Costumes on one side, factory, and couture across the street.

Her energy is infectious, and people come and go from the showrooms all the time.

This is where you go to get dress up party outfits, cosplay stuff. Actually, probably almost anything because Du Toit is like a fizzy bath bomb of creativity.

Effervescent and when in her company it feels like speaking to a long lost friend, even though you may have just met. She’s a power-woman.

People call her Heidi Hollywood

People started calling her Heidi Hollywood a while back, and the affectionate nickname stuck.

She runs Hollywood Costumes like a movie studio, with departments for everything.

Couture gowns, steampunk corsets, cyber costumes, school productions, film wardrobes, prop building, life-casting, latex mask sculpting, mascot manufacturing, and even authentic pilot uniforms.

It’s overwhelming, but so remarkably interesting. There is an FX lab, a spray booth, a Lycra garment factory for dance clobber, a prop house filled with typewriters and telephones, and a mould library, she said, is the only one of its kind in South Africa.

Page through this album

“I think we have more than a million costumes,” she said. “And definitely well over a million accessories and props. If you want a cowboy, we give you a cowboy. If you want a jailbird, a ballet dancer, a Chinese emperor, or a police officer, we have it. Anything you think of.”

There’s a Nathaniel moulded mask, one of Casper de Vries, she’s dressed the Parlotones’ Khan Morbee, and so many celebrities, film, and theatre credits that it needs 1000 words on its own page. She also dresses kids’ productions.  

“Sometimes schools take 700 costumes at once,” she said. “They come back, we wash them, restore them, and they go out again. It never stops.”

She also built a couture brand, Heidi Couture, that now dresses pageant queens and Miss South Africas.

Another brand she created focuses on steampunk fashion. In between are other gowns, matric dance dresses, bridal wear, and evening wear.

“Pageant wear is one of my favourites,” she said. “It is detailed, it is over the top, and it has to be perfect.”

Pageants are over the top, it must be perfect

Then there are the props. In one room stand Oscar replicas, sculpted in three sizes, from handheld to two metres tall.

In another are medieval swords, light up cyber costumes and a full ballet line. She’s even got an old Nationwide Airlines’ cabin trolley and old record players.

ALSO READ: From Benoni with love: baker turns cakes into yum works of art

When it’s not a collectable prop or relic, everything is designed and made there, on site.

“We try to be proudly South African,” she said. “We do not want cheap imports here. Every costume we make gives someone a job.”

Collectively, her brands employ 42 people. Even her family is part of the production line. Her grandson does 3D design and printing for props, which they finish with fabric, paint, and resin.

“We made a statue together the other day,” she said.

There is a kind of crazy in the place, and if you visit for the first time, you could get lost, but it’s part of the fun.

It’s an awe inspiring place. A shoe room houses racks of heels and boots, while the uniform section holds authentic military and aviation gear used in films. Nothing is too strange to end up in her collection.

“My husband says I am a hoarder,” she said, laughing. “But I am a good hoarder. I make money with my hoarding.”

I am a hoarder

People also ask her to make stuff, and she said, If you can dream it, she can do it.

One of the strangest commissions she has ever had was for an Afrikaans film.

“They asked me to make a 1.7 metre whale penis,” she said. “We made it out of dragon skin, so it moved like real skin. Unfortunately, it never got through the edit suite, so it didn’t get screen time, but it was a fun project,” she said.

The hours are long and the deadlines brutal.

“We sometimes work right through the night,” she said. “Especially when creating masks, it can go to morning light. But it brings out the best in us. The tighter the deadline, the more the creativity kicks in.”

Despite her workaholic streak, she says her family keeps her grounded.

“Almost 60, I have two daughters and six grandchildren,” she said. “They are my everything.”

NOW READ: Growing up with Parlotones rock royalty: Gen Z Emma Hodgson charts her own path