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Costume designer who collaborated with everyone from Zeffirelli in Bowie

When Franco Zeffirelli produced an opera, he hoped audiences would "revisit a lost planet". The costume designer Peter J Hall, who has died aged 84, worked with Zeffirelli for more than three decades, and was a key collaborator on his style of sumptuous, painterly nostalgia. Many 19th-century operas are set in a wistfully imagined past, which Zeffirelli and Hall animated with loving detail. The theatre scholar Dennis Kennedy argued that Hall's work for Zeffirelli inscribed "sentimental romanticism into a sensory evocation of period".

Fabric was Hall's lifelong passion. Making a toy theatre as a boy, he rummaged through his mother's wardrobe for scraps of material. "I remember those fabrics," he later recalled, "especially bits of an old evening dress â€" it was black net with tiny seed pearls over pale green silk. Lovely." Hall never lost this curiosity about the way material can move or gleam under stage lights.

The Second World War interrupted his studies at the West of England College of Art in his native Bristol. In the army, he brought his interest in the development of textiles in camouflage for the army. After the war he moved to London, and the first day of hunting, has been appointed assistant coach stage musical Gay Rosalinda Palace Theatre in 1945.

He subsequently began designing, and from 1957 was chief milliner at the Covent Garden opera house, quickly learning how much singers hate wearing hats. A key production was Lucia di Lammermoor (1959), which not only showcased the young Joan Sutherland as "poor mad Lucy", losing her mind in breathtaking coloratura, but also introduced him to Zeffirelli's meticulous flair as both director and designer. Zeffirelli had begun his career as a stage designer, so he and Hall shared a sensibility and working language.

Hall, and Zeffirelli began to tour Italy with a number of operas, many of which Sutherland. After control of costumes renaissance Zeffirelli, Hall began to develop their own clothes, starting with the production L 'Isola dei Pazzi in Spoleto, Umbria.

Back in Britain in 1960, Hall's vivid, Italianate Romeo and Juliet with Zeffirelli at the Old Vic was revelatory. Kenneth Tynan marvelled that the production, starring John Stride and Judi Dench, "evoked a whole town, a whole riotous manner of living". Hall's design for a later production of Romeo and Juliet, which played outdoors in Verona with an Italian cast, was backed by the city's peeling walls while church bells tolled.

When John Dexter became director of production at the Metropolitan Opera, Hall helped him restore dramatic credibility to a stale repertory. In Hall's relatively austere Aida (1976), the black soprano Leontyne Price reflected that "the colour of my skin became my costume". The enslaved heroine moved with paradoxical freedom among the cast, dressed in stiff robes and elaborate headgear.

The Met's house style was an extravagant pictorialism. However sumptuous the scale, Hall (who was appointed their resident costume designer in 1979) could humanise it. Character was key: "He wasn't just a dresser of divas," insists Moshinsky. "He told the story."

Hall was a talented painter â€" his costume sketches are notably delicate, and Moshinsky recalls that his apartment in New York was covered with frescoes in the manner of Tiepolo. Beyond opera, he occasionally worked in ballet; on films including Doctor Faustus (1967), with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor; and with David Bowie ("serious, intellectual, wonderful to work with") and Mick Jagger ("exactly the opposite").

Bowie, having admired Hall's work in New York, commissioned a colonial fantasia for his Let's Dance tour in 1983. The singer marvelled that Hall "chose all the materials and came to see how everything would look under our lighting". Whether rock or opera, Hall's eye for fabric, light and meticulous detail remained steady.

• Peter John Hall, costume designer, born 22 January 1926; died 27 May 2010

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