RAGS TO RICHES.(movie costumer designer Ann Roth)(Interview)

Though Ann Roth doesn't like to toot her own horn, or pat herself on the back, or really talk about what she does at all, she will say this: she totally gets the aesthetic of the working girl, and when she dressed Melanie Griffith for the movie that was a paean to said girl she could envision Griffith's character--the hair, the shoulder pads, the unforgettable running shoes--right down to which drawer she kept her nude hose in.

This fall, Roth is presiding over a vast hangar at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, where she is designing the costumes for a new M. Night Shyamalan movie about an isolated utopian community in the nineteenth century. The hangar is full of sewing machines, seamstresses, tables heaped with straw bonnets, and shelves of tall top hats and well-oiled men's lace-up boots. In an adjacent room, a "distresser" picks apart woollen pants with safety pins, and then scrubs them with coarse stones and sandpaper.

She and her crew chose patterns--leaves, flowers, starbursts, sprays of wheat--from early American wallpaper books and had them printed unevenly on crude linen. "I wanted it rough," she said. "A lot of handwork, patches on the knee, darning." For the greatest verisimilitude, she will use buttons made only from wood, bone, antler, vegetable ivory, or nut, and fabrics made out of wool or linen (the community has sheep and flax), but not cotton, silk, or anything synthetic. This rules out the Amish as suppliers, because, as one of Roth's crew put it, "the Amish are not afraid of polyester."

Roth is seventy-one, has an even tan, and wears a beaded ankle bracelet. She grew up in Hanover, Pennsylvania, among the Pennsylvania Dutch, and now lives in Northampton County. "I am very curious, and I remember everything: what people eat, what they wear, what they sing, what they look like," she said. Roth designed the costumes for "Nine to Five" (and sang backup on the title song), and has worked with Mike Nichols on every film he's done since "Silkwood." She won an Oscar in 1997 for "The English Patient," and has been nominated several other times, for her work on "Places in the Heart," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and "The Hours." (The nose was her idea.) Her professional idol is Piero Tosi, who did the costumes for Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard" and many other iconic Italian movies.

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