Dressing for the Emerald City: Wicked’s award-winning costume designer returns to Oz

NEW YORK – Paul Tazewell was 16 years old and living in Akron, Ohio, the first time he designed costumes for The Wiz.

It was a high-school production of the 1978 movie, and much of the work happened in his family’s dining room.

He has been summoned back to Oz several times since that first show – a workshop here, an NBC broadcast there. So, when American director Jon M. Chu asked him to design the costumes for the long-awaited film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, there was little learning curve to speak of.

A prequel of sorts to The Wizard Of Oz, Wicked centres on two reluctant roommates at Shiz University: Galinda, an effervescent daughter of privilege who goes on to drop a vowel (that first “a”), and Elphaba, a green-skinned outcast who goes on to pick up a title (the Wicked Witch of the West).

By the time actress-singers Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were brought on board to play the film’s lead witches, Tazewell, 60, a Tony Award winner for his work on the musical Hamilton, was already off to the races on his own preparations, collecting images of mushroom caps and bisected seashells for inspiration.

For all his familiarity with the extended Ozian universe, including Susan Hilferty’s Tony-winning costumes for the Broadway production of Wicked, Tazewell said it was clear from his conversations with Chu that there was little appetite to recreate any previous vision of Oz.

“It was important for Jon to reimagine what this world was going to be,” he said.

Here, Tazewell goes over sketches, swatches and fungus photos for three pivotal costumes from part one of Wicked.

1. Glinda’s bubble dress: Orbs and corkscrews

In the pantheon of great conveyances in cinema history, Glinda’s ride of choice surely floats into place somewhere among flying carpets, pumpkin carriages and tricked-out DeLoreans.

The bubble in the Wicked movie is a substantial update on the 1939 model from The Wizard Of Oz film. For starters, the soapy force field is activated by a foot pedal. But as a set piece, it is difficult to ignore. So when designing the dress Glinda wears to make her wafting entrance into Munchkinland, Tazewell had two major design motifs in mind: bubbles, obviously, but also spirals.

“The Fibonacci spiral was a big draw,” he said, referring to a mathematical form found throughout the natural world, from the whorl of a snail shell to the configuration of seeds on a sunflower head.

The shape’s associations with what Tazewell described as “life creation” and other mysteries of the universe added a dash of thematic relevance. “That felt very magical for me,” he said.

Recreated in carefully sculpted folds of nylon crinoline, the spirals gave structure and complexity to the more traditional fairy princess silhouette of actress Billie Burke’s Glinda costume in The Wizard Of Oz. Each nylon cone was sandwiched between layers of lighter, more buoyant silk organza that had been printed with bubbles which were themselves embellished with foil, creating a sense of iridescence. Sequins, beads and paillettes completed the effect.

On Broadway, the character of Glinda is already strongly associated with the colour pink. Indeed, a sort of pink-versus-green binary has been the show’s visual calling card since it opened more than 20 years ago.

But in key moments onstage, including the character’s bubble arrival (in a petal-like gown in baby blue) and her visit to the Emerald City (in a canary yellow dress), she diverges from her signature colour.

For the movie, Tazewell doubled down on pink.

As an identifying palette for Glinda, he said, the colour “runs all the way through her wardrobe, and even into the second film” – Chu broke the story into two parts, with the second expected to be released in November 2025 – charting her path from spoiled ingenue to the Wizard’s undersecretary of sugarcoating.

2. Elphaba’s Emerald City look: ‘Dark iridescence’

While working with Erivo on Harriet, the 2019 Harriet Tubman biopic, Tazewell got to know her for, among other things, her love of clothing. “That’s really where we bonded,” he recalled.

Simply as a function of character, Glinda’s wardrobe was probably always going to be overstuffed with showstoppers.

“But I also wanted to make sure that as beautiful and elegant as Glinda would be, that Elphaba would be just as beautiful and interesting and rich with just visual interest,” he said.

For Elphaba, whose costumes tend to skew dark in her most important moments on-screen, Tazewell was left to create that visual interest not with colour, but with dynamic textures and unusual fabric pairings.

Her Emerald City day-tripper ensemble, including the dress she is wearing when she takes to the sky for the climactic Defying Gravity number, is representative for its deceptive complexity. What looks solid black is actually three different fabrics: black silk chiffon on top of black lace on top of purple taffeta.

Why the secret purple? “It’s really just to give it more life,” Tazewell said. The “dark iridescence” of the taffeta, even beneath two other fabrics, helps the garment avoid reading as just a flat black dress.

The wave-like effect on the surface – inspired by the underside of mushroom caps, he said – was created by manipulating the micropleated chiffon into an irregular swirl pattern atop a stabilising gauze.

The silhouette itself was considerably more traditional, taking cues from Victorian-era clothing and – what else – actress Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West costume from The Wizard Of Oz.

3. Morrible’s academic robes: Gesturing at magic

Of all the characters in Wicked, it is the school’s headmistress, Madame Morrible, who undergoes the greatest style transformation in the leap from stage to screen – more stately and elegant than on Broadway, and with no cartoonish bustle to be found.

“Definitely influenced by Michelle Yeoh being cast in that role,” Tazewell said.

According to the designer, the Oscar-winning Malaysian star’s favourite costume was a look her character wears to greet new arrivals to Shiz University. To establish her as a magical professor, Tazewell looked to classic academic robes for inspiration.

In a riff on the coloured hoods that scholars use to indicate their academic disciplines and degrees, Morrible wears a stole screen-printed with a series of vaguely astrological-looking runes over a robe of amber-coloured silk panne velvet.

Beneath, a silk shantung “under robe” is accessorised with a broad, cutwork leather belt with a metal clasp effect. Not that a covetous actor is the most important benchmark of successful costume design, but the piece received Yeoh’s de facto seal of approval.

“She was asking for the belt to use in real life,” Tazewell recalled with a laugh. NYTIMES