When Amy Heckerling tapped Mona May to create the clothes for Clueless, May—a designer who then had only three feature films on her résumé, including such blatantly ungirly movies as 3 Ninjas and the martial arts action sequel Best of the Best II—was more than ready to try something bold. And Heckerling was happy to let her.
With Heckerling’s input and support, May looked to the high fashion on display on European runways, then twisted it in ways that suited the Clueless characters and matched the visual aesthetic of the film. But given the limited costume budget and the breadth of apparel that needed to be gathered—including clothes, hats, shoes, and other accessories from designers such as Anna Sui, Dolce & Gabbana, and then-up-and-comer Jill Stuart, as well as vintage shops, production houses, and regular stores—the approach had to be strategic. It also had to be complemented by the work of her partners in prettifying: makeup supervisor Alan Friedman and hairstylist Nina Paskowitz, who also played key roles in sculpting the beauty and style of Clueless.
Mona May, costume designer: When we started with this movie, read the script, and talked about it, it wasn’t about going to high school—American or LA high schools—and looking at what the kids wore. At the time, it was Kurt Cobain. It was very much the grunge time. Amy really wanted to have me invent something completely fresh and different, so it was cool. And she really appreciated that I came from Europe, where I could bring a little bit of that point of view to everything.
That’s what’s so great about Amy. She understands fashion, knows fashion, lives fashion, gets it completely. Which is very rare for a director. Most directors are men and they don’t really understand what an A-line skirt is or, you know, all the kinds of nuances and details of fashion that Amy and I can talk about for hours.
Mona May actually makes a brief cameo appearance in Clueless; she’s Fabian, the masseuse who attempts to relieve the tension in Cher’s back.
Alicia Silverstone, Cher: I’ve worked with Amy and Mona again, as a team. I didn’t remember this about Clueless until I did it with them all over again in Vamps—they work together so beautifully. Amy will have all these ideas and Mona will have her ideas. And Amy will come in and she just sort of—like on Vamps, she took her shirt off and put it on me. She’s standing there in her bra, going, like, “More of this!” She was just in there on the floor with me, figuring it all out. She’s just really, really detailed and involved in the costumes in such a brilliant way that they work so well together.
Mona May: At that time, I had to come up with things, completely come up with, like a fashion designer really comes up with future fashion. Because nothing existed, so it was interpreting what was happening in fashion—what’s on the runway shows—but then taking that back to the script and filtering that through the characters.
Amy Heckerling, writer-director: Plaid had made a comeback obviously because of grunge. You know, these things are always coming and going: stripes, polka dot, plaid. We’re good, we’re bad, we’re out, we’re in.
My main concern was making [the characters] look good, of course, and having fun . . . with the whole rave stuff, with the Dr. Seuss hats. There was that sense of crazy whimsy coming back.
Mona May: To Amy, it was very important that they’re not [in] runway shows, they’re not models. They’re real teenagers and we have to bring that fashion to the reality of their environment: who they are, where they are, how old they are.
When we were doing fittings, it was really interesting how we had to kind of make sure: what kind of shoes would make this outfit younger? We came up with Mary Janes because it really looked youthful. They were not running around in stilettos, looking like little hooker girls. It was very important that it is youthful and charming and sweet.
Amy Heckerling: Slutty was not part of it. They were teenage girls that couldn’t drive yet. The one that had had sex was—well, I guess also, you might say she was the most grungy, Tai. There were skateboards, druggie stuff. But nobody was wearing bondage-y shit or overtly cleavage-y things.
Mona May: We actually used very little black in the movie. That was a very conscious thing Amy wanted to do. She wanted the palette to be really happy, very vibrant. I think there are maybe two or three, maybe four things, that are black. I think there’s a black leather skirt. But very, very few things that Cher wears are black. Even for most of the girls, you didn’t see much black on them.
Amy Heckerling: I had the sense that I wanted the different color schemes going throughout. So Cher was wearing the fall colors when school starts, and she’s wearing the Alaïa, the Christmas-red dress, when it’s Christmas. Then she’s in the pinks when it’s springtime.
Mona May: I think [the budget] was like $200,000. Which was nothing. To have the main character have sixty-three changes, and you’d have all the big female characters have that many changes in the film, plus all the supporting cast and the background that I had to dress head to toe: that was really not a lot of money.
I didn’t have a lot of time as well. I think I only had six to eight weeks of prep, which includes the research, all the European research that I had to do—the magazines, the runways, and creating visual boards, discussing with Amy and trying to figure out what are the links that are between the characters and the fashion: what’s going to work, what won’t work. And then the next step was pulling everything, making stuff, assembling stuff from high-end boutiques to thrift stores to secondhand shops.
It’s a lengthy process.
Alan Friedman, makeup supervisor: Mona May had done tons of research and she had tons of tears and cutouts and pictures and that sort of thing, of what she was going for with either each look or each character.
I really very much relied on . . . the research she was able to do. I don’t know how many months she was on it beforehand, but she was always very generous about helping you out. We’re all working in essence toward the same goal and we’re all working, really, toward Amy’s vision.
Nina Paskowitz, lead hairstylist: It’s an interesting thing because on the one hand, there was a lot that we were able to arrange in advance, like the Pippi Longstocking [hair] on Elisa [Donovan] and a lot of the background. . . . When I say advance, sometimes that means just the day before. That’s how “advance.”
We had to do a lot on the fly on Clueless, so we would literally bring a whole bag of hair ornaments to the set, see what worked once [the actors] were placed in their position and had the clothes on, and go, “Ooh, what can we throw in here and here and here?”
Mona May: I can probably guess [how many costumes we had overall]. Hundreds. Probably a thousand costumes. By the time you dress all the kids in high school, by the time you do all the different groups, the parties—oh my God.
Stacey Dash, Dionne: We did a week of fittings before the movie started and it was about eight to ten hours a day of trying on thousands and thousands of clothes. And Mona’s genius was, she was able to not only have each costume exclusive to each character, she was able to meld it all together with everyone else so we all complemented each other. That takes a lot of talent, which is what Mona May has. So it was a pleasure to do.
Mona May: Every extra has been touched by my department. In some cases, head to toe. I think that’s where also the success is from, because everyone was touched. It’s not like “Extras: come in, line up, go.” It was to the smallest little detail.
I’m like a crazy artist who is checking every extra, you know. I mean, Amy, too. She would come down, too, and double-check everybody. . . . She really wanted to make sure that everybody who was in front of the camera was perfect. So not just the wardrobe, it’s the hair and makeup.
Nina Paskowitz: Everybody went through the works. And the thing is that we had an A-list group of background [actors] that worked all the time. Then we had secondary players that worked all the time but didn’t have lines. But they were seen every day. How we got it done is amazing.
Alan Friedman: So often [in a movie] you get a school full of people or an auditorium full of people and then they’re just moving scenery, they’re moving props, and nobody really cares what they look like . . . We specifically would try to attend to everybody, make them look the part.
Mona May: Imagine if just Cher and the girls and everybody looked great and then everything else was boring and everybody else was just walking around in their baggy jeans. . . . It just would not feel as rich. It wouldn’t be the feast for the eyes that everything was.
What was fun about this movie and maybe not having a lot of money, it made me more creative. I had to go to the thrift store. I had to go to high-end stores. I had to make some stuff and create things because they were not even in the stores, because they were just being thought out and dreamed up by the designers on the runway shows. It was really a mixture of high and low [fashion], which, interestingly enough, now is so in and so cool. But then it really wasn’t happening yet.
I had maybe twenty bins, like laundry baskets, full of hats.
I come from Europe and I myself in my own wardrobe and my style, I wear a lot of hats. I find hats super sexy, very, very fashionable. . . . Here we created a whole new fashion, which was like going back to London to Philip Treacy, who was one of my idols: a hatmaker who’s just a genius. To this day, [he] creates these unbelievable hats that the royals wear and all the ladies that go to the horse races and society ladies all over the world, as well as fashion shows. He was my inspiration for that, to bring the hats that were really cool and fun and street fashion to our film, and add to each outfit even more. I think it’s so much more complete when you have the schoolgirl outfit and then you have the hat [with] that, right? It’s just at another level.
Kokin, hat designer and maker: What was interesting was it was these young high school girls, in couture hats, worn in this very offhanded way. Like, “Oh, I put a hat on.”
Mona May: That’s why I’m so proud of this film. Because I didn’t go shopping. I didn’t go to Macy’s and pull something off the rack and go, “Oh, put that on.” It was such an effort, a creative effort, to really invent the fashion, to create something that a year later was going to stand on the screen and be new and fresh and set the trend. That was the first, foremost goal. It wasn’t like: “Oh my God, twenty years from now this movie is going to be cool.” It was really: the first goal was to make the movie cool once it comes out.