Extra Russian dressing: the daunting task of costuming the Metropolitan Opera's first-ever production of War and Peace.(Brief Article)

Die Meistersinger requires more than 400 costumes. Prokofiev's War and Peace requires 1,200. Everyone in the Met's costume and wardrobe departments agrees: it's the biggest show they've ever worked on.

As designed by Tatiana Noginova, even a relatively simple uniform consists of jacket, epaulets (detachable), overcoat, vest, shirt, neck-cloth, pants, stockings or tights, shoes, sword belt, medals of order, gloves and a hat. All told, the Met's wardrobe supervisor, William Malloy, estimates that War and Peace entails about 5,000 costume elements.

Because War and Peace is a co-production with the Mariinsky Theatre, the Met costume shop didn't have to build new costumes. But once the costumes arrived from St. Petersburg in early June, each one had to be dry-cleaned, a process that took four months (including a brief time-out to allow the company's early-season productions to meet dress-rehearsal deadlines). Lesley Weston, head of the Met's costume shop, recalls that "30 percent of the buttons were flat-out missing." Since uniforms require twenty-four to thirty-two metal, military-looking buttons, replacements can be expensive, as well as time-consuming.

Weston, needing extra space and staff to prepare the costumes, rented a workshop in Manhattan's Chelsea district, where two regular staffers supervised a temporary crew. Everyone at the satellite workshop spoke Russian -- essential, since all the paperwork, dressing-lists, inventory and other costume information were in Russian. Malloy also has hired some Russian-speaking dressers to work with a largely non-English-speaking cast.

Meanwhile, fittings and other preparations continued in the Met's two costume shops -- and in another space commandeered for the occasion: an area adjacent to the Met's stage door, which had been used by the New York Fire ...