Thirty years ago, costume designer Mona May joined writer and director Amy Heckerling on a scouting session at Van Nuys High School in the San Fernando Valley—in search of some real-life inspiration for their upcoming film, Clueless. What awaited them, as May put it over a Zoom from Los Angeles, was “awful!” The youth of yesterday were fully fledged grunge acolytes, all baggy pants and flannel.
So, May built her own fashion-forward world for Cher (Alicia Silverstone), Dionne (Stacey Dash), and Tai (Brittany Murphy) to inhabit. “I had to create a world that didn’t exist, and it was a very challenging task,” she says. With two months to prepare and a very limited budget, May managed to fashion one of the most culturally resonant films from the last century—with, she adds, “no [iPhones], no computers, no Amazon.”
The daughter of a diplomat, May was born in India and grew up in Poland and Germany. “I think that was something that informed me,” she says. “When I opened my eyes and saw the saffrons and yellows and fuchsias. You can tell a story with a color.” Indeed, there is no costume more emblematic of Clueless than Cher’s canary yellow plaid Jean Paul Gaultier skirt suit. “We tried a blue on, we tried a red suit. It just didn’t work,” she recalls. “When she put on the Jean Paul Gaultier, it was like, Oh my God, this is it. She’s the queen bee.” (It’s so iconic, in fact, that the cover of May’s forthcoming book, The Fashion of Clueless, is the telltale yellow plaid.)
Transcendent as it may be, the film’s fashion is not exactly meant to be attainable in terms of affordability. “This is a movie about girls who have daddy’s credit cards and they can go shopping at runway shows and designer clothes,” May says. Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, and Alexander McQueen were on the mood board, while Alaïa (“an A-what-a?”) and Calvin Klein are name-dropped in the script. But in reality, the film’s $25 million budget—roughly $60 million in 2025, still on the lower end of a mid-budget movie—did not allow for the Rodeo Drive wardrobe that the characters would have owned. “I went for the designer pieces, but then I had to get the thrift store stuff and alter everything,” May says. “Nobody mixed things like that before. The high and low didn’t exist. I think that also is what gave this timelessness.”
What kept May grounded, at the end of the day, was the realization that the film was about teen girls. Sure, they were shopping with grown-up cash, but they were still figuring it all out. (Brands like Trina Turk, Miss Sixty, and Betsey Johnson helped inject the youthfulness.) “It’s young girls, 16 years old. They’re not supermodels walking around. They’re innocent,” May says. “I think that’s why the movie is beloved—because they feel real.”
