Alvin Colt, who died Sunday at 91, designed costumes for more than 50 Broadway shows in a career that started with the landmark musical “On the Town” in 1944. He spent the last 15 years designing for “Forbidden Broadway,” a revue in which some of his satirical send-ups were based on costumes he had created himself.

Among the highlights in a seven decade career were “Guys and Dolls,” “The Golden Apple,” “Li’l Abner,” “Destry Rides Again,” and “Pipe Dreams,” for which he won a Tony award in 1956. He dressed Lucille Ball in “Wildcat,” Wendy Hiller in “The Aspern Papers,” and Carol Channing in “Lorelei.” For “Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit” last year, he created a “Lion King” costume with chopsticks for claws, a toilet brush mane, a dust sweeper for a crown, and a cape covered in Coke cans, all surmounted by a stuffed Mickey Mouse.

“He knew how to exaggerate things exactly enough,” the creator of Forbidden Broadway, Gerard Alessandrini, said.

Colt also was a charter member of the Phoenix Theater, a prestigious Off-Broadway company where he designed for plays by Chekhov, Shaw, and Ibsen.

Colt was born July 15, 1915, and grew up in Louisville, Ky., where his father was a custom tailor. Stagestruck from his earliest days, Colt created a little theater in his room, complete with lights that dimmed. He trained in set and costume design at Yale.

Colt got his first theater work in New York thanks to Lincoln Kirstein, who spotted him working at a theater in Maine and later invited him to design costumes for his Ballet Society (later the New York City Ballet). There, he became the protégé of the ballet’s chief designer, Barbara Karinska. The two remained close, and for many years he lived in her townhouse. At the ballet he also worked with Jerome Robbins (choreography), Leonard Bernstein (music), and Oliver Smith (sets), all of whom were involved with “On the Town.” A few years later, Colt was invited to design costumes for “On the Town,” which had lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. “Alvin made me look good,” Comden told the Wall Street Journal in 2004. She added, “He played a big part in the show’s success.”

While many of his most famous shows were musicals, he worked on a wide variety of plays and also worked in film and television, on projects including “The Adams Chronicles” (1976) and numerous specials.

“From ballet to burlesque, from ‘Coriolanus’ to ‘Wildcat,’ he’s done it all,” the artistic director for the performance series at the Museum of the City of New York, Michael Montel, said. Mr. Montel directed a show highlighting Colt’s career that coincided with an exhibition at the museum of Colt’s drawings last year.

For a quarter century, he created dramatic settings for the flagship Neiman-Marcus department store in Dallas, using a different national theme each year. In 1972, he re-created the Versailles Hall of Mirrors on the store’s first floor. He boasted that the director of the Versailles museum attended the opening. “He turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You have done this with the soul of a Frenchman.'”

Colt was much-beloved in the theater world, but was somewhat melancholy in recent years. “Most of my collaborators are all doing their shows up in heaven or someplace,” he told Playbill in 2006. “There are no more Ethel Mermans, and Carol Channing can’t get a job,” he complained to Women’s Wear Daily in 2007. Yet a leading lady inspired his last completed costume: the “Forbidden Broadway” version of Patti LuPone’s Mama Rose from “Gypsy.”

Standing six feet, seven inches tall, Colt cut a dramatic figure and was known for his bonhomie and critical eye. When confronted with people who were difficult, he liked to say, “Is this your first show?” This worked well. “They just freeze,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

“Alvin was always a gentleman and he certainly was a hero of mine,” the designer Bob Mackie said in a statement yesterday.

Oddly for a font of theater lore, he decorated his apartment not with theater memorabilia, but with figurines and pictures of giraffes, a commentary on his height.

His longtime companion, the Broadway actor and dancer Richard Tone, died in 2004. Mr. Tone was said to be the first male dancer ever to solo with the Rockettes.