Very Bad Hair and Clothes to Match

THE MOVIE: “Used People”

THE SETUP: A story of late-blooming love set in the ‘60s, between widow Pearl Berman (Shirley MacLaine, pictured) and her ardent suitor, Italian restaurateur Joe Meledandri (Marcello Mastroianni, pictured).

THE COSTUME DESIGNER: Marilyn Vance-Straker, whose previous films include “The Untouchables,” “Pretty Woman,” “The Rocketeer,” “Die Hard,” “Die Hard 2,” “Romancing the Stone,” and “48 HRS.”

THE LOOK: Used. 1969 was not a pretty year for fashion--or hair. Everyone is having a bad hair day, particularly MacLaine with her teased roller curls. And by movie’s end, you never want to see another print polyester pantsuit--the style favored by the movie’s seniors, Pearl’s mother Freida (Jessica Tandy) and her friend Becky (Sylvia Sidney)--as long as you live.

That said, it is this parade of “My, what ugly costumes” that sets this story in time and place. The camera homes in so closely on actors that sets are negligible to the point of being nonexistent. The fact is, the clothes are intensely, horrendously, humorously spirited. And Vance-Straker has an eye for detail: the plastic handbags toted by Tandy and Sidney, the go-go boots on Bibby (Kathy Bates), the three-quarter-length sleeves on MacLaine’s Jackie O. suits, which are studded with costume-jewelry brooches. Mastroianni is as much a fashion victim as the others in his brown shirts, ties and box-cut three-piece suits.

QUOTED: “When there are four people on screen together wearing these horrific things, you begin to embrace it. It started looking like a beautiful collage to me,” said Vance-Straker.

TRIUMPH: Pearl’s daughter Norma (Marcia Gay Harden) is an emotional wreck who expresses her fantasies through her closet. One day she emerges in a see-through sequined jumpsuit a la Barbra Streisand at the 1969 Academy Awards. She also has a Marilyn Monroe phase (a white polyester halter similar to the one in “The Seven Year Itch”), an Audrey Hepburn look (a black cocktail sheath and pearl choker from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), and Faye Dunaway-inspired headgear (a pageboy topped with a beret, straight out of “Bonnie and Clyde”). Each takeoff works wonderfully.

SOURCES: Vance-Straker unearthed some fashion treasures at estate sales, vintage clothing stores and Goodwill and Salvation Army shops. Period fabrics were found in New York and Toronto (usually in store basements) for Mastroianni’s suits and other costumes. Many of the shoes were unearthed in stores in the Fairfax District here and on the Lower East Side in New York.