LaCrasia Duchein and Jay Ruckel, the team who ensure the survival of LaCrasia Gloves – and New York City’s custom glove industry to boot – straddle two disparate worlds.

One is the glittering sphere of celebrity. For 25 years, LaCrasia has regularly outfitted the hands of Hollywood and Broadway aristocracy. Hung on a wall of their offices are hand-shaped cutouts identified as belonging to Kathleen Turner, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman. Kidman wore LaCrasia gloves in the film “Cold Mountain.” “They shot it in Romania,” said Mr. Ruckel, a soft-spoken man with a moustache and a graying mane of shoulder-length hair. “But the costume designer called me to make Kidman’s gloves. I said, ‘Those Romanians have eight generations of glovemakers behind them. I’d trust them before me.’ She said, ‘No, I only trust you for Nicole’s gloves.'”

Ms. Pfeiffer wore a pair of black vinyl sheaths as Catwoman in “Batman Returns.” In fact, LaCrasia has all the catwomen in showbiz history covered: Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar (both from the 1960s television series), and, most recently, Halle Berry, who required long leather gloves with crystallized rhinestone nails.

Another hand on the wall is marked “Prince.” For his “Purple Rain” tour, the flamboyant musician required 10 dozen purple lace gloves every two weeks. He wore each pair once.

Personal stylists form the missing link between Sunset Boulevard and LaCrasia’s ungentrified home on 28th Street. “They know the shoemaker, the hatmaker,” explains Ms. DuChein. “If there’s only one glovemaker, they’re going to find them.” (LaCrasia also shares a storefront space at 309 Fifth Avenue.)

The other world Ms. Duchein and Mr. Ruckel inhabit – really a demiworld – couldn’t be more removed from popular culture. It’s a world when Manhattan manufactured things other than hype and a nice Cosmopolitan; a world of individual craftmanship and adherence to traditions; a time when glovemaking was a viable enough field that it supported an entire town in upstate New York – Gloversville.

Thus, LaCrasia Gloves is not only a place where Britney Spears can find black-and-white striped fingerless numbers for her halftime routine – it’s also the location of the city’s only glove museum. The collection is loaded with obsolete tools that have names and purposes all but lost to the world. A wooden last of an aristocrat’s hand, carved during the 18th century. A collection of glove guards, once used by stylish ladies to attach their mitts to a handbag. An ancient container of alum, used by Victorian ladies to shrink their hands prior to the hour-long process of wrenching on kid gloves purposefully made fashionably tight. A wide array of glove turners, needed to reverse the items in question, which are sewn inside out; some are wooden, some amber, some improvised (a table leg).

Mr. Ruckel is seriously interested in these things. He owns more than 2,000 glove stretchers, and a few inventions whose use is uncertain even to him. To better devote himself to the assemblage, he returned to the Fashion Institute of Technology at the age of 50 to secure a master’s in museum studies. Later, he made a personal commitment to deliver more than four dozen speeches on gloves over a five-year period. Not wanting to repeat himself and liking a challenge, each lecture has been different. One tracked the history of Gloversville, where an abundance of soft water and hemlock trees needed for tanning once begat 300 glove factories. Another told the story of the oven mitt.

A third lecture concerns how novelist Philip Roth once plundered Ruckel’s mind for raw material. “Philip Roth came here and recorded about four hours of stories,” said Ruckel. “About 66 of my stories ended up in his novel ‘American Pastoral.’ I have this killer talk I give to literature professors with pictures of everybody who was in a story, or who told the story or where the story was told in Gloversvillle.” Mr. Roth laid down not a penny for his inspiration. He did, however, surreptitiously autograph several of his novels while Ruckel visited the bathroom – a payment of sorts.

Mr. Roth’s tales likely featured the mentors Ms. Duchein and Mr. Ruckel credit with schooling them. The first was William LeBouvier, from whom they bought a factory in Long Island City. “His words to me when I discovered his factory were ‘Get out of it! You’re going to lose your shirt! You can not make any money on gloves in this country anymore. Everything has gone overseas,'” recalled Ms. Duchein, a small woman with a ready smile and large, warm eyes. Mr. LeBouvier specialized in fabric gloves. To master the leather trade, Mr. Ruckel drove five hours upstate to Gloversville to learn at the knee of another master, the late Joseph Perrella.

Mr. LeBouvier, natty in the shirt and tie – once common dress for an expert cutter – still plies his trade in the Lacrasia offices, which are neatly divided into two rooms. In one, a small fleet of women hunch over miniature sewing machines, enacting what passes as mass production at LaCrasia. Here, there are yet more singular contraptions. A 2-ton clicker cutter that imprints dyes in the shape of hands, thumbs and forchettes (the bit of fabric that goes between the fingers) upon multiple layers of fabric. Long, flat silver pressing irons, heated up to a toasty 300 degrees, rid finished gloves of wrinkles.

In the other room, Mr. Ruckel – the hands-on half of the duo – executes his custom creations. He is the sole “table cutter,” inhabiting what was once the top job in the field. Had he lived a hundred years ago, an employer would have filled his home’s stove with coal and daily fetched his prized person in a carriage. “Bosses knew that, if someone looked the wrong way at a cutter, he could pick up and take his skills elsewhere,” said Mr. Ruckel. He works from paper-thin leather harvested off long-haired sheep native to the equatorial countries of Africa and then treated and died at Pittards, a storied tannery in Leeds, England. “No other kind of skin can get this thin and give you that kind of pull,” Mr. Ruckel points out. Adds Ms. Duchein: “We just hope Pittards stays in business.”

An individual hand measurement can be secured in a manner that is both easy and makes no sense. Wrap a tape measure around the knuckles at the base of your fingers, make a fist, check the measurement, and then subtract one half inch. For this, according to Mr. Ruckel, we can thank the French. “A French ruler is almost 13 inches long,” he related. “A French inch is called a ‘zoll.’ Most people who live in France have never heard of the word ‘zoll.’ It’s so antiquated. But all the sizes are predicated on this ruler that you can’t buy today because there are no glove cutters.”

Historically, glovemaking was a family business, handed down from father to son. For Mr. Ruckel, this is true in an accidental sense. Only after he first picked up the shears in the 1970s did he discover that he was a descendent of the Roeckls, a still functioning, 165-year-old German glove dynasty. “Jay went in and introduced himself when he went to Germany some years ago,” said Ms. Duchein, obviously proud. Mr. Ruckel was treated well: “It was nice to meet them and go to Roecklstrasse in Roecklplatz, with three generations of Roeckls drinking espresso.”