TV costumes get a starring role

LOOKING at a curtain rod jutting from the shoulders of the Miss Starlett dress -- a gown Bob Mackie created for a “Gone With the Wind” spoof on “The Carol Burnett Show” -- it’s hard not to laugh all over again.

Mackie famously included all the drapery fittings from the plantation’s curtains, including giant tassels, cording, valance and the inspired touch: the rod.

The dress became legendary, and it’s just one of the highlights of “The Outstanding Art of Television Costume Design,” a new exhibit that spans 40 years of TV costume history. The free show at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum and Galleries in downtown L.A. is a collaboration between FIDM and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the governing body of the Emmy Awards.

The work of mounting the exhibit began more than three years ago, when FIDM guest curator Mary Rose began discussions with the college. Through her longtime connections with collectors and fellow costume designers, Rose located many of the 143 costumes in the show, which runs through Sept. 9. She believes the exhibit is the first of its kind in the world, and certainly at FIDM, home to an annual movie costume display at Oscar time and a recent “Star Wars” retrospective.

The show is most notable for helping the cause of costume preservation, if only for anointing these costumes as worthy of a museum exhibit and not just reuse as moneymaking studio rentals -- or worse.

“Appalling things are happening to costumes,” says Rose, who has watched designers tearfully hand over their work to studios so that they may cut the costumes into one-inch squares to be pasted onto trading cards.

These aren’t just old clothes, however. Seeing familiar television wardrobes in the light of day can reaffirm their importance to our national fashion sense as well. Executive women took cues from the pastel-dressed-but-ferocious Cybill Shepherd, who sparred with Bruce Willis on “Moonlighting” in the 1980s. The fashion excesses of “Falcon Crest,” “Knots Landing” and “Dynasty” reflected our national economic confidence of the time -- and, in a sense, paved the way for modern-day bling.

For Rose, the displays also illustrate how a TV costume designer quickly captures the essence of a character through clothes, even with contemporary shows such as “The Sopranos” or “Everybody Hates Chris.”

“Without having the face or the body of the actor, you can still identify which character wore the clothes,” she says.

For costume designers, the exhibit also bestows some long-overdue recognition. Few may know the name Jean-Pierre Dorleac, but the prolific designer nabbed Emmy nominations for “Quantum Leap” every year from 1990 through 1993, for AMC’s “The Lot” in 2001, and for other projects. He has a cult following as the costume designer for the original “Battlestar Galactica” series in 1978 and the sequel “Galactica 1980.” With nine separate show wardrobes of his on display, the exhibition is virtually a Dorleac retrospective. As important, Rose could easily locate his work.

“He had his costumes because he had it written into his contract that he gets to keep them,” Rose says, adding that Edith Head, the multiple-Oscar-winning costume designer, told him to do so.

Most of the costumes are the work of Emmy-nominated or -winning designers, including current nominees April Ferry for HBO’s “Rome,” Glenne Campbell for the Sci Fi channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” and Catherine Adair for ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.”

The exhibition also provides exposure for Costume Design Guild award winners such as Laura Goldsmith for ABC’s “Alias” and Jill Ohanneson for HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” FIDM basks in a little reflected glory as well, by displaying the work of two graduates: Ohanneson and multiple Emmy winner Wendy Benbrook (Fox’s “MADtv”).

At a kickoff party at FIDM earlier this month, costume designers and their staffs gathered in the school’s museum and gallery space to study the clothes and reminisce with veterans such as Mackie and Nolan Miller, the latter of whom gave the outsize personalities of “Dynasty’s” Joan Collins and Linda Evans the shoulder pads to match. Many of the party guests will meet again Aug. 19 when the academy hands out statues during the Creative Arts Emmy Awards.

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‘The Outstanding Art of Television Costume Design’

Where: Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Museum and Galleries, 919 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays

Ends: Sept. 9

Price: Free

Info: (213) 624-1200, Ext. 2224; www.fidm.com