Vintage vantage

As TOC staked out the city’s destination vintage-shopping ’hoods for this week’s issue, we recalled some of the impressive collections of 20th-century period costumes we’ve seen onstage this year. From the 1930s ingenues of Stage Door to the gaudy, bawdy 1970s polyester visions of Abigail’s Party to the rad-to-the-bone ’80s revelers of Hey! Dancin’!, recent months have seen Chicago ensembles clad in authentic vintage duds—and on non-blockbuster budgets: None of these shows spent more than $500 on costumes. So how do their enterprising designers, to borrow a phrase, make it work?

“I use lots of vintage and secondhand stores, some consignment stores, and even [at] Salvation Army you can occasionally find some very good things,” says Melissa Torchia, who pulled together the eye-boggling disco prints for A Red Orchid Theatre’s Abigail’s Party. From February through May, Red Orchid ensemble members Kirsten Fitzgerald, Mierka Girten and castmates resurrected some of the most hideous patterns of the last 40 years for the smash-hit Mike Leigh revival, which returns in a Theater on the Lake remount later this month.

Torchia gives particular props to Boystown’s kitsch-loving Beatnix (3400 N Halsted St, 773-281-6933)—“they have a really good selection downstairs”—and Roscoe Village’s Shangri-La Vintage (1952 W Roscoe St, 773-348-5090). “They go to estate sales and collect things from all over the country,” she says. “It’s a really small place, but they’re really willing to help you if they know of something specific they can source for you.”

Torchia had only five actors to dress. For the Factory Theater’s ’80s dance-party campfest Hey! Dancin’!, which ran in March and April, designer Rachel Sypniewski had 15—and spent just $250, half of Torchia’s budget.

“I do the circuit of thrift stores,” Sypniewski says. She favors the Unique chain, particularly the location at Montrose and Sheridan (4445 N Sheridan Rd, 773-275-8623), “and a few of the Village Discounts—there’s one up in Andersonville that I frequent” (4898 N Clark St, 866-545-3836).

But even the thriftiest designer can’t do all of her ’80s shopping at thrift stores these days. “You used to be able to go into a thrift store or a secondhand shop and it would all be ’80s,” Sypniewski says. “Now that we’re 20, 30 years out, it’s a little more difficult.”

As much as possible, Sypniewski mined the moldering closets of Factory’s own cast. “There was a portion of the actors that were in their teenage, high-school years during the ’80s,” she says. “And then a chunk of them that were barely born.”

Torchia’s Northwestern classmate Izumi Inaba wouldn’t have had much luck digging through her actors’ personal collections for period pieces to match Griffin’s April–May revival of Stage Door, the 1936 Ferber-Kaufman gem about aspiring actresses in Broadway’s early days, but the greater historical distance allowed her more room to fudge. The styles in which Inaba dressed her expansive cast edged pretty far into the ’40s, and her costumes for the show’s few men “weren’t necessarily period at all; [it was] more important to keep the color palette accurate,” she says.

“If I go into thrift stores, I can usually find one or two period-looking dresses” to match early-20th-century styles, Inaba says. She gives big credit to industry go-to Lost Eras (1511 W Howard St, 888-747-7677), a costume repository with options to rent or buy.

“They have a huge stock of vintage clothing, but they’re not really sorted out, so you have to go and dig,” Inaba says, echoing her storefront colleagues’ advice about thrift stores and vintage resellers of every stripe.

As for Sypniewski, she says she’s memorized the discount schemes of thrift chains like Village Discount and Unique, where Monday might mean everything’s half off. “You try to make every dollar go as far as it can,” she says.