Going Into Great Details : Hollywood Designers Count on a Cache of Craftspeople for the Bits & Pieces of Costumes That Make Their Pictures Whole

As the film awards season gets into high gear, what better time to pay homage to Hollywood’s fashion artisans? The style mavens of “Hoffa,” “Batman 2” and “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” to name a few, are indebted to the craftspeople featured here for supplying delicious visual details that speak volumes. And isn’t that what the cinema is all about?

Di Fabrizio Botega

Pasquale Di Fabrizio and his staff have stitched custom-made shoes for 33 years and for more than 1,000 movies, he estimates. A pair done for Ed Wynn, who appeared as a buffoon type on “The Red Skelton Show” in 1962, launched the Italian-born shoemaker.

His shoes do more than look good, they can work wonders, like make an actor look taller. “To tell all the secrets would take a month,” Di Fabrizio says with a chuckle at his shop in Los Angeles.

“This is an art that every day dies,” he says. An art that requires knowledge not only of foot anatomy, circulation and balance but also of the nuances of period fashion. “The shoes have to be 100% the truth of the time,” he says.

Di Fabrizio’s recent credits include “Hoffa” and “Batman 2,” in which Danny DeVito, portraying the Penguin, required four pairs of low lace-up boots with a platfom on one to give him a limp. For her performance as Catwoman, Michelle Pfeiffer and her four stand-ins needed 30 pairs of knee-high, high-heeled black patent boots with hooks and laces.

Warren Beatty has worn the shoemaker’s handiwork in each of his movies, including eight pairs of spectators for 1991’s “Bugsy,” as well as at home, Di Fabrizio says. “He even has slippers we make for him.” Such indulgences don’t come cheap: Women’s shoes start at $500, men’s at $650.

A Dyeing Art

The hand-dyeing of fabric--costumes, leather, buttons, flowers, feathers, you name it--is indispensable to movie costumers and invisible to the audience.

“If I do my job well, you never know I’ve been there. You’d never know why they ever needed a dyer,” says Edwina Pellikka, who has recently worked on “Hoffa,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “Batman 2.”

For “The Untouchables,” she dyed loads of Armani suits. “You can actually make a good-guy gray or a sinister gray, which is not a warm and cozy gray but a nasty gray. A little colder,” she says.

Pellikka, who apprenticed in the dye shop of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and has a master’s degree in painting, worked in regional theater, ballet and opera before doing “Return of the Jedi.” That on-screen credit launched her business.

One of her biggest jobs was “Dick Tracy.” “Eighteen months of our life. All those colors were ours,” she says. Pellikka dyed more than 30 samples before costume designer Milena Canonero settled on the yellow for the detective’s overcoat.

One assignment is never easier than another. “Whether it’s a bright green you want or a muted green, you have to work just as hard to get it,” says Pellikka, whose services are also available to the public. “However, a really nice fiber is a joy to dye.” Silks and velvets, including Jodie Foster’s prairie-wear costumes in “Sommersby,” “take on a jewel quality.”

Pellikka’s Glendale studio--where she also creates silk-screened prints--contains three 80-gallon vats, two 100-gallon vats and one 680-gallon vat that can hold 100 yards of fabric. She prewashes the material and fills the vats with mixes of water and industrial dyes based on her recipes.

“If you want to make gray fabric, you know that blue and orange make gray or green and violet make gray. So if you have a fabric that’s a little greeny, you add a little violet.”

Harry Hatz

The “Toys” poster showing Robin Williams in a tomato-red derby is a personal billboard for Harry Rotz, owner of Harry Hatz in Atwater Village.

The custom hat maker is a former actor who learned millinery in the costume shop of New York’s Juilliard School.

For his first big movie, “The Color Purple,” he made “down-home character hats” of the ‘20s and ‘30s for Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. Although he once manufactured a line of hats, Rotz now exclusively serves the entertainment industry.

Besides his work for “Toys,” Rotz recently did five small tailored hats for Winona Ryder in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” working by trial and error.

“For each hat, say Winona’s wedding hat, I’d make three samples and (costume designer Eiko Ishioka) would pick one. We weren’t always sure which shape would work on Winona because she’s so petite.”

The hats were extremely delicate, made of silk, brocade and satin and devoid of trim. “There was nothing fussy at all, which meant the silhouette and shape were most important,” Rotz says.

Gloves by Hammer of Hollywood

Hilda Hammer’s tiny glove shop is a charming anachronism amid the hip West Hollywood shops that deal in distressed motorcycle jackets and secondhand cowboy boots.

During the peak glove-wearing years--the ‘40s through the ‘60s--44 people worked at the Melrose Avenue store, which was three times its current size. In the early days, Hammer and her husband, John, brought their babies to the shop, changing diapers on a card table in the back of the workroom.

Today, with only two seamstresses and one cutter, Hammer still provides Hollywood with gloves, including 30 pairs of elbow-length black patent leather gloves, sans claws, for Michelle (Catwoman) Pfeiffer in “Batman 2.”

“We did the original Batman gloves when it was on TV,” says Hammer. “Robin wore green leather, Catwoman wore black leather, and Batman wore blue satin stretch with blue fins.”

The company’s first Hollywood assignment, pink leather scalloped gloves with black hand-stitching, appeared on Linda Darnell in the 1947 movie “Forever Amber.”

When she is not making stock for her shop (men’s leather gloves go for $65, women’s for $49.50), Hammer fills orders from filmmakers, like the strange one for a single man’s glove. It was for Dustin Hoffman’s title character in “Hook.”