Obituary

Barbara Matera

Making costumes tough enough for Broadway

Few now associate New York with handcraft skills, but the glamour of Broadway shows depends, in part, on workshops staffed not only with seamstresses as devoted as any from Parisian couture but with their bosses, women like Barbara Matera, who has died aged 72. She "built" costumes, the theatrical verb conveying much about the robustness of construction that sustains a stage outfit - a wearable soft sculpture sweated into nightly for years.

The costume house of Matera, owned with her husband Arthur, opened in 1968, and its 75 textile technicians dressed more than 100 shows, plus films, ballets and operas. Matera did a little light designing herself for stars who were friends, such as Barbra Streisand and Angela Lansbury, a buddy after she played Mame in the musical. She also came up with that purple gown with glinty bits that Hillary Clinton wore to her husband's presidential inaugural ball in 1993.

Born Barbara Gray in Kent, Matera put in her apprentice years in wardrobe shops, with their requirements for durability in London - at Stratford, the Old Vic and Covent Garden. She moved to the United States in 1960, and found a mentor in the great designer Irene Sharaff, who recognised her innate feel for cloth, and a gift for physical flattery of performers.

Matera got her kicks from the imaginative practicalities of the business - "So much fun was had making this tutu," she said, of a dress representing green salad in a TV commercial for vinegar, "ribbon onions and foam tomatoes with beeded seeds". She "really loved tutus, too"; they seemed the spirit of ballet, suspended in pale clouds from the ceiling pipes in her studio on Broadway at 19th Street, when a company was being reclothed.

During three decades on Broadway, she sewed it all - Florence Klotz's costly showgirl robes for the original production of Follies; the superdrag in La Cage Aux Folles ("Bird costumes can be very taxing," she complained, plumes were always a ward-robe department pain); the bustles of Sunday In The Park With George ("We love underwear scenes," she admitted, meaning corsets and pantaloons, not low-yardage scanties); and the half-garment, half-artwork beast of The Lion King.

For the movies, she made the flapper frocks in The Great Gatsby, and the slipper satins that softened The Age Of Innocence. Matera built outfitting even less destructible than usual for tours for Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones. She took a shelf of awards, her favourite being a theatre development fund prize named after Irene Sharaff.

Matera's exhibition at the New York public library for the performing arts, in 1996, was called Inside And Out, a reflection of her company motto; all its costumes, even those for the chorus and corps de ballet, were crafted to the same standard as those for the stars, the workmanship as fine within, as without. She delighted in secret details to be appreciated only by the wearers, perhaps a tiny silk rosebud under a crinoline.

In the exhibition, Matera demonstrated how she began with a designer's dream - say, Anthony Powell's sketch for Glenn Close's lounging pyjamas in the musical of Sunset Boulevard, adjusted it through many muslin mock-ups, and then - voila! Close tried on the result, but winced under its weight, and Matera had to charm her into posing in front of a mirror before she appreciated the "wow" quality.

Matera expressed her devout religious feeling by keeping the small Albany church near her home always flower-decorated - at first, from her garden. At Easter and Christmas, she staged big production numbers for its altar, as she did for the Holy Cross, in the Manhattan showbiz district on 42nd Street - she did her stuff for the musical of that name, too. She was working on the Abba-inspired Mamma Mia when she died.

Her husband survives her.

Barbara Matera, costume designer, born July 16 1929; died September 13, 2001.

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