An enormous cloud of pink tulle rests atop a cutting table in the costume shop at Santa Fe Opera. Sometimes called illusion, the semi-sheer net fabric is used for bridal veils, for petticoats, for tutus. It has body; it's starched but can float like a spider's web. It's been fashioned into a negligee and looks innocent in repose. But like the character whose silhouette it frames and from whose shoulders it falls as she fires six bullets into her lover, it's to die for.

A small dressing room just off the costume shop is fitting for an interview with Tom Ford — former creative director for the storied Gucci fashion house, now president and CEO of Tom Ford International, and for SFO's 2009 season, designer of costumes for The Letter. It's only days away from the premiere. Outside, drapers, tailors, and seamstresses work at full tilt. In a burnished baritone, Ford acts as narrator as he flips through his sketches, vintage photographs, swatches of lace and velvet, samples of buttons and bindings that fill the pages of three black books — all inspiration for his first foray into opera.

"When I start designing anything, even if I'm designing a regular runway collection, I start with a lot of research. The first thing was to really look at Pat [Racette] and start thinking about what would work on her body.

"Because there are only two women in the opera, I had to think of a way to make them really have impact when they were onstage." Ford nods to a drawing of a woman in profile. "This is Leslie's book. So, this is her peignoir." A sketch of a floor-length, sheer negligee hides nothing much. "She's trying to seduce her lover. There's this pale, pale, blush-pink net, so you really see through it. Underneath she has on a form-fitting, pale blush-pink lace nightgown. Movement — and a little bit of drama. It's the opening scene of the opera, and it needs to be 'Ahh!'

"When she realizes that her husband is about to show up and that she looks very guilty in this transparent get-up, she runs back offstage and she comes back out in a much more chaste dressing robe."

The love-child of composer Paul Moravec and librettist (and Wall Street Journal drama critic) Terry Teachout, The Letter was commissioned by Santa Fe Opera and has its world premiere on Saturday, July 25. British theater and opera director Jonathan Kent stages the one-act, 90-minute piece starring soprano Patricia Racette as Leslie Crosbie, wife of an English rubber planter in Malaya. Sets are by German scenic designer Hildegard Bechtler, who makes her SFO debut.

"I couldn't ask for a better set," Ford said. "It's a great foil for the clothes. The most important thing onstage is going to be the silhouette. It's very simple. It's very spare. Which is also why it's challenging to do costumes for, because I think that when a lot of people come to an opera, they expect big, overblown sets and costumes."

Former SFO general director Richard Gaddes first approached Ford about making costumes for the opera. "I said no for a few years, because I was so busy doing other things," Ford said. "Then Jonathan Kent e-mailed me. Jonathan is great. He's very handsome too. I met with him in London, we had drinks at Claridge's, and I liked what he said to say about the opera, and so here I am."

The production is set in the late 1930s, based on the W. Somerset Maugham story, which was set a decade earlier. "Jonathan said, 'Well, you can set it in the '20s or you can do it in the '30s,' but I chose the '30s because it's much easier for costuming. ... You had a waist in the '30s. In the '20s you would have just had an absolute straight dropped waist, and opera singers are larger than supermodels, generally, and I didn't think that would look great onstage."

Maugham published his story of passion and deceit in 1924; his play had its premiere in London in 1927. The Letter was adapted for film in 1929 and again in 1940 by director William Wyler, giving Bette Davis one of her most memorable roles.

In dressing the company, Ford uses a color palette to send emotional cues. "Her husband starts off in beige and moves to dark as he understands what's happening with Leslie."
At first Robert Crosbie believes his wife's story — that she shot neighbor Geoff Hammond in self-defense. After a letter surfaces that threatens to reveal to a jury and to a husband who worships her that Hammond was her lover, Leslie's horizon darkens.

"His next outfit is a medium brown," Ford said of Robert Crosbie. "When the two of them are in court together, he wears dark brown ... but he and she are in the same shade of dark brown and they're kind of putting on that unified air, and everyone else in the courtroom is in pale, ivory, tropical colors. By the end of the story, he's in a black tuxedo."

Singapore in the 1930s, where some of the story takes place, "was a place where people really overdressed," Ford said. "I mean the colonials — who really had nothing to do, because everyone was working for them and labor was cheap — spent a lot of time having their clothes made. And it was very, very fancy. ... I'm sure they were a little bit behind London and Paris, but they had the fashion magazines and they had such cheap labor, they just made clothes."

Ford turns more pages of the book. "That's Chanel. These are Pat's shoes, which we're having made in Italy. These are handbag sketches. Inspiration for the coat. Inspiration for the dress." Ford laughs, "I shouldn't be showing you these! I should edit these! What am I doing! This is Leslie's suit. She wouldn't have really worn velvet, but we needed that gradation of brown onstage to give it some life, so we've got velvet trimmed in satin."

We open the book on the character of the Chinese Woman, the "other" woman. Leslie Crosbie can't believe that her lover could have gone for "that woman in all her spangles."

"In the film, the two women meet, which is fabulous," Ford said. "In the opera, they don't. ... In the opera, [Mika Shigematsu, the Chinese Woman] goes to an office to sell the letter to the husband. It's a rainy day in the libretto, so she comes in out of the rain in her cloak, a very simple brown. I wanted to be a little more abstract. I didn't want to do literal Chinese embroidery. I wanted to do a kind of late-'30s, almost slightly surreal Chinese costume. She ends up with something very over the top, with hand-painted gold and smashed chunks of glass and topaz. Ornaments in her hair, and I'm doing something really stylized with her hair — I'm lacquering it, like that." Ford points to a vintage photo of a woman with a sleek black helmet of curls.

"But otherwise, you have a sea of men. In suits. Which still look pretty much like the kind of suits we wear today. The fit of the men is very beautiful, 1930s silhouette. Most of these patterns are from my collection. What I do in my own collection is very late-30s. It's such an elegant period. I often wear ... a single-breasted peak lapel; Cary Grant wore them always. It gives you a bit of flash. You always have to keep your button buttoned."

Another book shows men in faultless white ducks or more elegant tropical linen. "They each have a bit of a story," Ford said. "This guy, Howard Joyce [Leslie Crosbie's lawyer], is really a snappy dresser; he's always in spectator shoes. Richard Crosbie comes in from the field at the beginning; he's a bit beaten up and sweaty. He then becomes darker and darker and darker. Ong [Joyce's law clerk] is very Westernized, in a white suit and wearing little spectacles, much like he was in the film. To make 23-year-old, 6-foot 4-inch-tall, blond Americans into plantation workers has been a challenge! We've devised these head wraps. And then these same guys have to become English gentlemen in a club scene. They can't be tanned — they have other operas they can't be tanned in — so we can't give them spray tans."

Born in Austin, Ford spent his school days in Santa Fe, where he lives when he's not in Los Angeles or London. In 1990, early in his career, Ford was hired as designer of women's ready-to-wear at Gucci in Milan, a company then in decline. Ford moved on to become its creative director and is credited with turning around the company's fortunes. When Gucci bought the house of Yves Saint Laurent, Ford became its creative director as well. After leaving Gucci in 2004, Ford started his own fashion house.

"It's been great to be here in this room," he said of the opera costume shop. "In some ways it's a bit of a throwback to when I was first starting out. I don't have 30 assistants here. I have one assistant that I brought with me who's terrific. I hadn't actually sat down and chosen, with the garment in front of me, every plain horn button that goes on something in a long time.

"For me, designing is always done mostly on the body. Anybody can make anything look gorgeous in a sketch. A sketch is fakery. It's a way to communicate what you need to the pattern maker. Once we're in a fitting, that's where the design happens. And I'm kind of, in my own team, well known for being scissor-happy. Because that's to me where you design. Making them walk around, I watch everything move when you walk. Where does your leg come out. Is it tight enough across your butt? Is it not?" It's been years since Ford has designed a line for women. "I'm thinking about it, he said. "I'm more than thinking about it. I miss it. It's one reason I said yes to this."

Ford points to a still from the film. "As you can see, it's monochromatic. I like that idea, we kept that. [Davis is] tough, she's tough. Look at those shoes. They're cool, aren't they? Here are Pat's other costumes: she wears an ivory dress, a gray jacket when she goes in for questioning, and she stays in prison in this ivory dress and she crawls all around on the floor. We've had to make several of them, so that we can get them cleaned in between crawling around. And then when she's in the courtroom scene, she's a little somber and serious; she's in a very tailored, dark brown suit, but with spectator pumps and a lot of pops of white to make her stand out onstage. And then in the end, when she's been acquitted, she's innocent, and she's in a beautiful white, simple evening dress with some white flowers in her hair. A great costume to die in, I think."