The woman behind the seams of The Dressmaker

They have been travelling the country, being put on display in National Trust-listed mansions and country homes, and now, finally, about to land in Canberra for a new exhibition at the National Film and Sound Archive.

Does she ever worry about those delicate confections being damaged en route to here or there?

"We're extremely careful with them," Boyce says, a smile in her voice on the line from "crisp, hilly" Tasmania, where she is working on the film The Gloaming.

"It's actually easier putting them on a mannequin as opposed to actors frolicking in them."

Quite. Though, she's not entirely blase about the process of putting the costumes on public display.

"People who love textiles and fabrics naturally want to touch them," she says.

"When the costumes are on display, we have to position them far enough away to stop the hand doing what the hand wants to do."

Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse from the novel by Rosalie Ham, The Dressmaker was released in 2015 starring Kate Winslet, Liam Hemsworth, Judy Davis, Sarah Snook and Hugo Weaving, the costumes were almost characters in themselves.

The Dressmaker is a bittersweet, comedy-drama set in early 1950s Australia.

It tells the story of Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet), a beautiful and talented woman who, as a child, was blamed for a crime she didn't commit.

After years in exile, working in exclusive Paris fashion houses, she returns to her remote home town, Dungatar. Tilly reconciles with her eccentric mother Molly (Judy Davis) and unexpectedly falls in love with Teddy (Liam Hemsworth).

Armed with her sewing machine and sense of style, she transforms the women of the town and rights the wrongs of the past.

Boyce designed the costumes and an army of people brought them to life, even ensuring the hosiery was dyed to the right hue; that the colours of the costumes excetuated the actor's skin tone.

Looking back on the project, she says it is a mixture of wincing at the pain of demands of the costumes as much as giggling at the humour in the clothes, as much as the beauty, the way they transformed the characters.

Part of The Dressmaker Costume Exhibition at the NFSA is a behind-the-scenes tour of Boyce's Melbourne workshop, showing how the team starts with the script and map's our their journey in costumes. There are cutters and sewers and corset makers and dyers, shoemakers and milliners involved.

When asked if she has a favourite costume, she says it's like picking a favourite child. But there is no going past the show-stopping gown worn by the grocer's daughter Gertude "Trudy" Pratt (Sarah Snook) as she literally spreads her wings, with the help of 30 metres of silk organza.

"I'm really proud of that," Boyce says.

"Sarah is a really splendid actor and a lot of the transformation in the film was around her," she says.

"She did an enormous amount of research and just showed a lot of poise and looked exquistie,"

Boyce won the AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards) gong for best costume design on a feature film for her work on The Dressmaker . She was also nominated for an AACTA award for best costume design in a television series for her work on Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries.

The fourth of eight children, Boyce was always interested in textiles and design, but the household was more interested in surviving with 10 people in it, than such fripperies as fashion.

"When I was 11, I remember telling my mother I wanted a full-length denim coat," she says.

"Somehow she did find me a full-length denim coat and I quickly told her, ' No, Mum, it's not the right cut'."

Needless to say, she was on her own after that. Boyce says she never wanted to be involved in mainstream fashion, preferring the story-telling of cinema and television. She put on alternative fashion parades, was approached to work on a film and then applied for and got a job as a costume designer for Channel Ten, where one of her jobs was creating the drab, grim uniforms for the Aussie drama Prisoner, the antithesis of the beauty in The Dressmaker.

Looking at the way women did dress so beautifully in the 1950s, albeit it strung up with restrictive corsetry, what does Boyce make of fashion in the Instagram generation, when it seems to be less about clothes and more about flesh.

"I do find we have lost our sense of occasion in the way we dress," she says.

"Sometimes you need to stop and take stock and you'll find when you think about what you're wearing, it becomes a lot more fun."

And we can't not ask her what she makes of how our politicians dress as The Dressmaker gowns make it to the national capital.

Not too many surprises, that despite the controversry of her sparkling-Rachel-Gilbert-budget-night dress, former foreign minister Julie Bishop has Boyce's vote as Best Dress Pollie.

"She does go outside the box, but not too much, just enough. And she's not afraid to be a woman," Boyce says.