ALL DRESSED UP AND READY TO BOW

In the cool, tomblike chambers, spirits of Hollywood stars dressed in satin mingle with ghosts of silk-robed 18th-Century French aristocracy and apparitions of American Colonials wearing calico.

The specter of a Renaissance courtier in velvet breaches lurks near the vision of a Chinese nobleman clad in a red kimono.

You may think you’re in another place and time, but the scene is the County Museum of Art’s new Doris Stein Research and Design Center for Costumes and Textiles.

About 35,000 pieces, including garments, accessories and textiles, make up the museum’s costume and textile collection. The major cache, representing 240 cultures from the 16th Century to the present, is augmented by about 4,000 written resource materials. Its new home, to be open to designers, scholars, students and researchers (by appointment only) around July 1, was recently completed after seven years of reconstruction.

Edward Maeder, the museum’s exuberant curator of costumes and textiles, has overseen the process that transformed the existing, poorly utilized space into what he hopes will be a “mecca for costume scholarship.”

“We want to make available to fashion and theater designers, students and scholars the materials we have, without endangering those materials,” explained Maeder. “Our ultimate goal is to print a series of publications, hold symposia and generally advance the scholarship in the area of costumes and textiles.

“But we’ve also been trying (with the costume exhibitions) to make history and scholarship exciting. People often think that something old is simply old and not fascinating, and that something historical is dull.”

Walking through the new climate-controlled center, Maeder displays a fascination with and fresh approach to fashion that make it easy to see how he’s made some 15 crowd-pleasing costume exhibits during his seven years at the museum anything but dull.

“I call this one a monument to British bad taste,” he said, pointing to a brash yellow gown shot through with silver threading. “It was worn at night and the silver would pick up the candlelight so as the wearer moved around the ballroom floor, it reflected thousands of flickers of light.

“These men’s velvet coats (also 19th-Century English) were embroidered with the latest flowers,” he explained, pulling one out for inspection. “The embroiderers had access to the latest botanical manuals and incorporated the absolute hottest, newest plants into the embroidery so people would know you were absolutely ‘with it.’ ”

Such anecdotes, Maeder said, prove that the historical study of fashion, like any historical analysis, helps us understand how people felt about themselves in the past. “And clothes are the most personal remnant of the past.”

The bi-level, 1,200-square-foot center houses movable banks of drawers for shoes, hats, gloves, fans and other accessories, along with the tall, closetlike enclosures covered by Levelor blinds containing the garments themselves.

It also has a research library with rare books, manuscripts and periodicals from the 16th Century to the present--such as “The Whole Art of Hairdressing,” a manual from 1782--and an American Quilt Study Center.

Work on the Stein center began four months after Maeder joined the museum in 1979, he said, when he met with county architects.

“Then I found a company called Crystallizations Inc. They’ve done storage in the White House and the Smithsonian. I’ve worked with them two years now and we think this is going to be a model for a lot of storage facilities in the future.

“It’s not inexpensive, but it’s flexible--its components can be moved anywhere, and are made of light-weight, easy-to-maneuver aluminum that won’t rust, corrode or emit acid.”

An $800,000 grant from the Doris Jones Stein Foundation made the center’s completion possible, supplementing funds from the local Fashion Group Inc., the museum’s Costume Council and other sources.

Doris Stein, who died in 1984, was married to the late Jules Stein, a physician and philanthropist who created MCA Inc., the parent company of Universal Studios. More than 100 hats once belonging to Doris Stein are in the museum’s costume collection, begun in 1954.

Maeder, 41, whose grandmother was a tailor, has been sewing, knitting, weaving and making lace since his childhood in Wisconsin. His resume includes a degree in art from the University of Wisconsin and work and advanced studies at distinguished art and costume institutions in England, Switzerland, Italy, France and Belgium.

He curated an exhibit of 18th-Century attire in 1983 that drew crowds smaller only than the museum’s King Tut and “Day in the Country” extravaganzas. His inaugural exhibit with the new center, “That California Look: Textile Designs by Elza Sunderland,” opened May 20, and he’s planning an exhibit on dress before, during and after the French Revolution, as well as a Hollywood show.

“The joy of this renovation is that now we’ll be able to see some of the extraordinary things we own,” Maeder exclaimed. “We have Rudolph Valentino’s suit of lights, Mary Pickford’s costumes, a suit worn by Charlie Chaplin and the dress worn by Joan Collins in the ‘Virgin Queen’--which sends everyone into hysterics.

“But yes, a fine art museum is absolutely the proper place for a costume collection, and we regard the pieces in our collection as works of art. Also, I think we have a population that’s ready for this. We have a vast metropolitan population here, we have the film industry and the fashion industry.

“And costumes and dress are an area that’s fairly new and extremely rich, and an area in which almost everyone is interested--because we all wear clothes.”