The best dressers on Oscar night

In "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," Liv Tyler's Arwen wears a hand-embroidered corset of Indian silk brocade. Her flowing skirt is made of silk velvet edged with metallic thread, and leaf-shaped sleeves cascade down her arms to emphasize the ethereal image of an elf princess.

The elaborate gown from the epic saga is just one of thousands of costumes that earned Ngila Dickson one of two Oscar nominations this year. She'll be competing against herself for her work in "The Last Samurai."

It took weeks of sketching to come up with the Art Nouveau-inspired design for the crown that Tyler wears.

But ask Dickson what's she most proud of and it's evident that it's the hidden details that thrill Ms. Dickson the most: the elaborate butterfly design on the back of Tyler's silver crown, for example. And the invisible underskirts that were dyed and hand-embroidered to get the same shimmering gleam as the outer layers.

Dickson has no regrets that few moviegoers were able to see those fine details.

"I don't mind that nobody knows the amount of detail that went into it," says the designer, based in Auckland, New Zealand, whose previous credits include TV's "Xena: Warrior Princess." "That's not the point. The point is when you watch the film, you feel it's real."

Box-office success and four-star reviews mean little in the complicated world of Hollywood costume designers like Dickson.

What counts most is workmanship and palette control and the fact that the pocket handkerchief worn by Jeff Bridges's Depression-era mogul in "Seabiscuit" is folded just right.

At an annual exhibit of the best movie designs of 2003, which opened earlier this month in a downtown Los Angeles gallery, visitors are treated to a time warp.

The futuristic black-leather suits worn by Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in the "Matrix" share a room with the red-and-white jockey silks and 1930s brown wool suits of "Seabiscuit."

Around the bend, the hand-stitched kimonos of "The Last Samurai" hang within sword-throwing distance of the micromini skirt and leg warmers worn by Cameron Diaz in "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle."

Few people may have seen "View from the Top," a flight attendant comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow, but its fluorescent blue and orange uniforms deserve a place alongside the Royal Navy hats and epaulettes of the Oscar-nominated "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," according to Kevin Jones, museum curator of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, which is hosting the exhibition.

"What's important is how the costumes appear on screen - what the colors look like, how the fabrics move, whether they reflect the time period correctly," Mr. Jones says.

For the designers, the drive for authenticity often requires fastidious attention to detail.

In "Seabiscuit," the heart-tugging true story of an aging, crooked-legged horse, designer Judianna Makovsky scoured the US and Europe to find the heavy wool used in the 1930s men's suits worn by Bridges and thousands of racetrack extras.

She then enlisted a veteran studio tailor who had dressed Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and other legendary actors to re-create the Depression-era suits.

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