HOLLYWOOD — Roz Vardanian could read a body across a fitting room. Before the tape measure confirmed it she knew where a jacket would pull at the shoulder and where a hem would hang wrong, and she kept the pins for the fix held in her lips, a habit her own teachers had warned her against and she never once broke.
Mrs. Vardanian, a studio seamstress who fitted and built costumes for motion pictures across six decades, died May 27 at her home in East Hollywood. She was 87. Her son said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
She started at fifteen as a finisher in a Hollywood costume house, sweeping threads and sewing hooks and eyes for pennies, and worked her way onto studio wardrobe crews at a time when a picture might dress hundreds of extras from bare fabric. The public saw the result on a leading actor and thought about the actor. Mrs. Vardanian thought about the seam. A hero costume, she liked to explain, was rarely one garment; it was four or five identical copies, so that one could be soaked, one torn for a stunt double, one kept pristine for close-ups, all of them cut to hang the same on camera even as the story wrecked them.
Much of her best work was meant never to be noticed. She aged new cloth to look decades worn, matched a repair so a ripped costume could survive a reshoot weeks after the first take, and let out a waistband between setups without a word to anyone about why an actor had needed it. Discretion was half the trade. “Roz knew everybody’s real measurements and everybody’s secrets, and she took all of it to the grave,” said Lucille Ferro, who worked wardrobe beside her for twenty years. “You do not fit people for forty years without learning things. She never once traded on any of it.”
The work thinned in her later decades, as productions came to rent and buy more than they built and much of the making moved overseas. She adapted by specializing in the repairs and fittings that still had to happen in the room, on the body, the day of the shoot. She stayed in the union, the costumers’ local, and mentored younger cutters until the arthritis in her hands finally made her set down the shears.
Rosalind Vardanian was born in 1938 in Fresno to Armenian immigrants and came to Los Angeles at fourteen. Her husband, Garo, a tailor with his own shop, died in 2009; the couple had run competing needles under one roof for half a century, an arrangement their children describe as loud and happy. She is survived by two sons, Vahe of Glendale and Aram of Hollywood; a daughter, Satine Kojian of Pasadena; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Her sewing room at home has been left as it was: a black machine older than her children, a dress form standing in the corner in a half-pinned muslin, and a tomato-shaped pincushion so dense with pins it has not shown its red in years. Her daughter has taken the shears. The pins, she said, can stay where her mother put them.