Puppet Love : James Hayes’ customers might be among the best-dressed in town. But they don’t get too animated about their specially designed duds. After all, they’re puppets.

Fashion designer James Hayes’ home office is overflowing with foam, fleece and feathers--not the remnants of one of his offbeat clothing creations but rather the stuff his customers are made of.

Hayes dresses puppets for a living. His most recent work will show up soon on the ethnically diverse puppet kids from “Puzzle Place,” a new Sesame Street-like children’s program from Lancit Media set to air on KCET starting Jan. 16.

Surrounded by colorful spools of thread, bolts of fabrics, baskets of buttons and boxes of bows, Hayes, 33, spends his days concocting crazy hats, distressed overalls, way-out party dresses and frizzy hairpieces that will take the characters through one adventure after another.

“It’s kind of like being in a toy factory,” says Hayes, whose Silver Lake work space is also cluttered with puppet portraits ostensibly autographed by the “stars” he dresses. “It does sound a little juvenile but that’s because it is. I mean, I am playing with toys all day.”

It’s not all play and no work, however. Hayes says puppets, unlike people, have superhuman needs when it comes to clothing. “You couldn’t just go to a Gap store and buy clothes for these kids. Their arms are longer, their necks are smaller and their shoulders are way smaller than humans’,” he says. Because shirts sometimes have as many as four sleeves (to accommodate the puppeteers hands) and most pants have three legs (to house the cable mechanism that works the eyes), “everything has to be built from scratch.”

They also have to be designed in multiples. “We did an episode where two of the characters, Leon and Kiki, were painting and had to have a second set of overalls with paint all over them,” says Hayes, who does his own spray painting, sandpapering, grating and shredding. “It’s called teching a garment, and I do it whenever a script calls for an activity that would cause the clothes to become different-looking.”

Hayes’ job is not confined to clothes, however. In one episode, a puppet dreams that he and the rest of the “Puzzle Place” kids wake up with dreadlocks. “I had to make little wigs for everyone with these funny little sausage things out of felt that I turned inside out and brushed. Then I hot-glued them to a skullcap.”

All of this takes time. A typical T-shirt might take minutes to produce on an assembly line, but a puppet T-shirt can take as long as five hours to manufacture.

Meanwhile, the “Puzzle Place” puppets--a Norwegian-German boy named Ben, a Mexican-American girl named Kiki, an African-American boy named Leon, a Native American boy named Skye, a Jewish girl named Jody, and a Chinese-American girl named Julie--pose an additional set of challenges for Hayes because of their unique personalities and ethnic backgrounds.

“Kiki is a little more assertive so I tend to dress her in bold prints and bright colors,” says Hayes, who speaks of the puppets as living entities. “Jody, on the other hand, is very artistic and likes to wear hats so I make a different hat for her in every episode.”

For a holiday episode (one of 40 shows already produced), Hayes had a $300 budget to design outfits that celebrated each character’s ethnic heritage. “Leon celebrated Kwanza along with Christmas and Hanukkah, so I had to make a kente-cloth-printed sari kind of thing for him. Jody wore a blue, cut-velvet dress with a Jewish star pendant. Skye needed to wear a buckskin shirt with beads on it and fringe.”

For accuracy and authenticity on the latter, Hayes sought fashion advice from a White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona.

Hayes never planned to be a puppet-costume designer. A native of Latrobe, Pa., he moved to New York in 1981 to study fashion at Parsons School of Design. For nearly five years he designed men’s, women’s and children’s sportswear for Bugle Boy, Sergio, J. Crew and Tommy Hilfiger.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1990 with one dream. “I told my friends I would go to some Hollywood cocktail party, meet someone who needed someone to make some inexpensive science fiction costumes for a movie, and my talent would be discovered.” In a roundabout way, the dream came true.

For Halloween, 1990, Hayes wanted to create a costume for himself that would literally stop traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard. To do that, it would have to be of prehistoric proportions.

“I did ‘Jurassic Park’ even before Steven Spielberg,” says Hayes, who created a realistic Tyrannosaurus rex costume out of gray, dyed springweave and sculpted foam padding with Ping-Pong ball eyes and satin teeth. The costume was 7 1/2 feet tall, and the tail stretched out an additional seven feet.

“People were much more aggressive than I thought they would be,” he says of the crowd’s reaction. “They were touching me and jumping on my tail and stuff. It was just crazy.”

Watching all this was Jeffrey Lampert of the Walt Disney Co. He was in charge of production on a newly created children’s program called “Dinosaurs,” about a modern stone-age family of dinosaurs.

“For me it was a gut reaction to the costume,” Lampert recalls. “I’m doing a TV show about guys in dinosaur suits and here’s this guy walking around West Hollywood in a dino suit. I thought, who is this kid? He’s phenomenal. And it turned out he was trying to get into the business. It was great.”

That meeting got Hayes an interview a few weeks later with Polly Smith, the costumer on “Dinosaurs,” who immediately hired him to sew. Five months later when Smith left the show, Hayes ascended to the top spot.

In retrospect, Hayes admits the task was Gargantuan. “Earl (the father dinosaur) had a 110-inch waist. Fran (the mother dinosaur) was smaller. But she was still 65 or 70 inches around, which is unthinkable. And necks were anywhere from 45 to 60 inches. Nothing could just be bought and used.”

During a hiatus from “Dinosaurs” before the show became extinct, Hayes was asked to costume the puppets for the pilot episode of “Puzzle Place.” “The clothes he did for ‘Dinosaurs’ were brilliant, so I knew James was definitely the right person for ‘Puzzle Place,’ ” says Kevin Clash, the show’s senior creative consultant.

In addition to working on “Puzzle Place,” Hayes was recently hired as wardrobe supervisor on “Thunderbirds,” a 1960s children’s TV series being re-edited with live action sequences and re-released in early 1995.

“I still can’t believe a bank thought I was so successful they should give me a mortgage,” Hayes says. “It was like ‘this guy dresses puppets for a living, let’s give him a loan!’ The whole thing is just so funny. . . .”