With a Clip-Clip Here: Sewing Up Oz for “Wicked”

Paul Tazewell, a former wizard himself, commanded a staff of a hundred and forty people to dream up and sew the costumes that Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, and company wore over the rainbow.
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Illustration by João Fazenda

A week or so ago, the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” sold at auction for thirty-two and a half million dollars. Expensive slippers. For thirty-two and a half million dollars, you could buy the Wicked Witch of the West’s hat, which sold at the same auction, plus Marilyn Monroe’s dress from the subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch,” and still have twenty-five million left over. How to spend the rest? “I would go for the gingham dress on Dorothy, but that’s for the resale value,” Paul Tazewell said the other day. “I’d think about Gene Wilder’s coat and hat from ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.’ The green velvet dress in ‘Gone with the Wind.’ Any of Vanessa Redgrave’s costumes from ‘Camelot.’ Those were very magical.”

Tazewell is the costume designer for the new “Wicked” movie and is considered a favorite for an Oscar. He was out for a walk in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is around the corner from his home, and whose flora had provided inspiration for a lot of his designs—bluebells, Fibonacci spirals, ferns. “Nature seemed really appropriate,” he said. A gown for Glinda, Ariana Grande’s character, mimics the ombré of roses in Regent’s Park, near an apartment in London where he lived while working on the film. The elaborate pleating in a dress for Elphaba, Cynthia Erivo’s character, resembles the gills of a cremini or a portobello. “I happened upon a documentary on mushrooms and funguses,” he said. “I was just scrolling on Netflix.”

Tazewell wore a navy-and-orange plaid jacket, a dark tie-dyed scarf, and blue Lululemon pants—“my comfortable walking trousers.” He found a seat on a bench by the water garden which faced a grove of catalpa trees. “Wicked” was the biggest film production he has worked on. The marketing budget alone was estimated to equal the cost of five pairs of Judy Garland slippers. For big scenes, the costume department employed a hundred and forty people. “We had tailors, and each of those tailors had a staff of assistants and stitchers,” Tazewell said. “There was a team of machine embroiderers and hand embroiderers. A team of hand beaders, too. We had an in-house weaver who also did the hand felting. There was a machine knitter and a hand knitter. There were belt-makers and jewelry-makers and the armorers for our guards. There was a whole staff of milliners. And then there was the 3-D printing and laser cutting for the crown and the crystal shoes.” The bodice for one of Grande’s dresses took two hundred and twenty-five hours and twenty thousand beads. Single set pieces required enough costumes to fill a warehouse. He also designed C.G.I. suits for animals.

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Cartoon by Jon Adams

Tazewell has spent most of his career in the theatre: “Caroline, or Change” (with Tony Kushner), “The Color Purple,” “Suffs.” He did “In the Heights,” on Broadway, and became a Lin-Manuel Miranda collaborator. Miranda asked him to join “Hamilton.” “My biggest priority was to not fuck it up,” Tazewell said. (He won a Tony for the show.) Later, Steven Spielberg hired him for the “West Side Story” movie. “Tomorrow I’ll be starting the first day of a new Spielberg film,” Tazewell said. “I can’t say what it is.”

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Without planning to, he has repeatedly found himself designing Oz. He did the televised version of “The Wiz” in 2015, for NBC; he’d done the musical years earlier, too, in Akron, Ohio. “It was my first fully realized design of a show,” he said. “I also played the Wiz!” He was a junior in high school. “I was leading it, but my family pulled together the costumes. I was thinking ombré even during that first production, because I wanted the Glinda cape, which was gold lamé, to be ombré’d in a rainbow pattern. I asked my dad”—a research chemist for Firestone—“if he could spray these colors in a certain order. It wasn’t the ombré that I was hoping for. But I was, like, I can manage.” He went on, “The fact that ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is the one fairy tale that we embrace as Americans is pretty wonderful if you think about what Baum was saying about power.”

He strolled past the children’s garden, where a scarecrow stood among denuded stems. Tazewell’s a Botanic Garden member, and he comes often. “My husband passed away right before I moved here,” he said. “So I started going to the park and using it as a place to grieve and express.” He’d never been to the bonsai greenhouse, so he went to check it out: closed. He headed for the Japanese gardens: closed, too. But he could stand outside the gate and watch a water show from some fountains. It’s his favorite spot in the park. “The asymmetry is really beautiful,” he said. “The different textures of the trees. It’s all manipulated. But it’s manipulated in a very thoughtful way.” ♦