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François Lesage, who for more than a half-century led the embroidery atelier that has served couture designers from Charles Frederick Worth through Karl Lagerfeld of Chanel , died on Thursday in Versailles, France. He was 82.

In a statement, the Lesage company, which was acquired by Chanel in 2002, said that Mr. Lesage died at a hospital after a long illness but provided no further details.

Mr. Lesage was revered for maintaining the couture craft and its tradition of making every stitch and attaching every bead by hand. The number of true couture designers has dwindled over the last few decades, and so have the ranks of the artisans, known as “petites mains,” upon whom they rely. Mr. Lesage sought to ensure the future of the company, France’s oldest embroiderer, by establishing a school near its headquarters in Montmartre.

The Lesage family has been closely associated with couture embroidery since the 1920s, producing elaborate visions of leaping horses for Elsa Schiaparelli, Van Gogh’s irises for Yves Saint Laurent and an enormous faux leopard skin that became a dress by Jean Paul Gaultier. Each work required hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours of precision beadwork to create, commanding prices of $100,000 or more for an elaborate ball gown.

“Yves Saint Laurent may call and say, ‘I want snakes, crocodiles and alligators,’ or Claude Montana may call and say, ‘I want sand,’ ” Mr. Lesage once said. “I have to be a chameleon.”

François Lesage was born on March 31, 1929, “into a pile of beads and sequins,” as he put it. A few years earlier his parents, Albert Lesage and Marie-Louise Favot, had bought the embroidery studio of Albert Michonet, founded during the Second Empire as the embroiderer to Napoleon III. Michonet produced embroideries for Worth, often considered the founder of couture, and many of the oldest houses.

At 19, Mr. Lesage, steeped in his family’s business, moved to Los Angeles, where he opened a studio on Sunset Boulevard selling Lesage embroidery to costume designers and movie stars. “Marlene Dietrich liked figure-hugging dresses,” he said in a 2009 television interview. “She wanted embroidery that transformed her body into a jewel. It was a pleasure to work for her.”

But when his father died in 1949, Mr. Lesage returned to Paris to take over the atelier. As the head of the company, he introduced many of the great designers of postwar Europe to Lesage, including Cristóbal Balenciaga, Pierre Balmain and Christian Dior. And with the rise of ready-to-wear, Mr. Lesage expanded production to include embroidery for many American designers, among them Calvin Klein, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta.

But with very few artisans so specialized now surviving, only a handful of designers, dominated by Chanel, have been able to produce such elaborate embroidery designs with Lesage in recent years.

Mr. Lesage’s survivors include his wife and four children, two of whom have also worked in fashion. A son, Jean-Francois Lesage , began making home designs in Chennai, India, in 1993, and a