Dressing for the Emerald City

To create the costumes for the new Wicked movie, the film-makers turned to a Tony Award winner who already knew his way around Oz.

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, 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 director Jon M. Chu asked him to design the costumes for Universal’s 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 room-mates 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 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 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, 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.

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 — for starters, the soapy force field is activated by a foot pedal — but as a set piece, it’s difficult to ignore. So when designing the dress that Glinda wears to make her wafting entrance into Munchkinland, Paul 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 Paul 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 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, Paul 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” — Jon broke the story into two parts, with the second expected to be released next fall — charting her path from spoiled ingenue to the Wizard’s undersecretary of sugarcoating.

While working with Erivo on Harriet, the 2019 Harriet Tubman biopic, Paul got to know the actor 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 onscreen, Paul 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’s 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,” Paul said. The “dark iridescence” of the taffeta, even beneath two other fabrics, helps the garment avoid reading as just a flat black dress. (Paul worked closely with the film’s director of photography, Alice Brooks, to make sure Elphaba’s costuming details weren’t swallowed up in darkness.)

The wavelike effect on the surface — inspired by the underside of mushroom caps, he explained — 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 — Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West costume from The Wizard of Oz.

Morrible’s Academic Robes: Gesturing at Magic

Of all the characters in Wicked, it’s 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,” Paul said.

According to the designer, Michelle’s favourite costume was a look her character wears to greet new arrivals to Shiz University. To establish her as a magical professor, Paul 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. (Did the symbols mean anything? “They were made up,” Paul said.)

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 Michelle’s de facto seal of approval.

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

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Louis Lucero II

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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