The grand ball that ends Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was unprecedented in the movies. There had been crowded costume scenes before, but none with the same historical reality: hundreds on screen in the full dress of 1860, as individual and complete on those in the far background as in foreground closeup. The women are laced into bodices laden with ornament and jewels, atop tent-sized crinolines; their hairstyles are often accurately unflattering. Yet nobody looks conscious of being in period costume; they are just wearing extraordinary clothes that shape them into the postures and gestures of another time.

Piero Tosi, who has died aged 92, was the Italian designer who created that time-travel effect. He could produce characterful modern costumes – pitiful singlets and thin blousons for peasant workers in Rocco and His Brothers(1960) – but his honorary Oscar in 2013 (by which time he had been nominated five times) was for his historical imagination.

The cinema had never seen Tosi’s standard of re-creation, executed after 1960 by his longterm collaborator Umberto Tirelli, who collected antique garments to study and established a company to replicate them. Each ensemble was unique – they made a single gown for Claudia Cardinale to wear during the five months spent shooting that ball; it had days off for cleaning and repair. Tosi influenced and trained a new generation of costume designers whose forte was the past, including Gabriella Pescucci and Milena Canonero.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest From left, the costume designer Piero Tosi, the actor Dirk Bogarde and the director Luchino Visconti on set for Death in Venice, 1971. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

He researched through art, especially conversation pieces and genre paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, since an artist showed both the architecture of clothes and how they were worn – the attitude, gait and gestures that expressed class and gender. Tosi’s favourite recreation was people-watching; he could construct a whole life out of a T-shirt. Only non-fashion photographs inspired him, and his most remembered costume, Silvana Mangano’s walking suit for Death in Venice (1971), evolved from an early colour photograph of Visconti’s mother.

Tosi came out of the artisan traditions of his birthplace, Florence, where his father taught him the family business of metalwork. But the boy secretly loved theatre, reading Shakespeare and inventing costumes. He loved Hollywood movies, too, and his favourite designer was Travis Banton, to whose decadent fur and lace for Marlene Dietrich Tosi paid homage in The Damned (1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). The boy’s artistic talent won him a place in Florence’s applied arts institute for artisans, the Porta Romana.

In The Leopard women are laced into bodices laden with ornament and jewels, atop tent-size crinolines

At barely 20 he helped with costumes for a local theatre production, but his break came through Franco Zeffirelli, also an art student from Florence, although at a different college; they had known each other for years. Visconti came to the city in 1949 to stage Troilus and Cressida for a music festival, and Zeffirelli, then assistant to Visconti, got Tosi a beginner’s job on the costumes. In the same year Tosi’s aunt took him to the Venice film festival (he had never been out of Florence, and he never went to another festival, even when his own work was in competition) where he saw Visconti’s La Terra Trema and knew he wanted to make movies.

That meant moving to Rome, where he, Zeffirelli and Mauro Bolognini (later a director who commissioned Tosi) shared an apartment, the rowdy centre of their creative circle. Tosi worked on stage productions for Visconti, who came to trust his sure taste and never-satisfied research. His first film for Visconti was Bellissima (1951), starring Anna Magnani as a working-class woman venturing into Cinecittà studios; the contrast between her simple cotton frock and the movie people’s cool adds pathos to the comedy. Tosi then worked for Visconti on 12 films.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Silvana Mangano dressed by Piero Tosi for Death In Venice. Photograph: Alfa/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Modern realism was economic with cloth, but from Senso (1954) to L’Innocente (1976) Visconti also made huge-scale period productions on budgets that fluctuated sharply, sometimes during shooting (The Leopard’s funding dwindled from day to day) and demanded materials that were out of fashion, or no longer manufactured, even in textile-conscious Italy.

Visconti could find authentic locations and dress them with genuine antiques, but, other than an occasional original accessory, Tosi had to create voluminous costumes from scratch, searching warehouses for outmoded fabrics and trimmings. The Damned demanded slithery crepe de chine when most silks in stock were hard and crisp; seaside outfits in Death in Venice had to be of linen, a fibre superseded by cotton or synthetics. Italian artisans could provide what could not be found, but it took time and Tosi’s exacting supervision.

He loved the search, and, when Visconti intended to film Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Tosi went to Paris to track down descendants of its characters’ originals, hoping for family pictures. Proust was Tosi’s ideal challenge, a writer who knew how a pair of shoes were both character and narrative. To Tosi’s regret, the film was never made.

He designed for Zeffirelli – La Traviata (1982) and Storia di una Capinera (1993), set in Tosi’s beloved 1860s – and for Pier Paolo Pasolini an ethnographic Medea (1969) in which Maria Callas clanked with metal plaques like something out of his childhood. Federico Fellini longed to work with him; however Tosi could not abide Fellini’s chaos and the closest they came was Tosi improvising wild makeups (unusually for a designer, he liked styling hair and painting faces) for Satyricon(1970).

His Oscar may have been for period pieces, but, to appreciate his skill, look at Magnani in Bellissima in an underslip that elevates her ungirded figure from comic to tragic, or Sophia Loren in very little lingerie, craftily sculptured and layered, in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963); the image sold the film.

In 1988, Tosi began to teach and coach at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, which later helped organise exhibitions of his costumes in New York, Rome and Florence.

Outside work, which he seldom was, Tosi was totally private; his personal life never became public knowledge.

• Piero Tosi, costume designer, born 10 April 1927; died 10 August 2019