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If Willy Wonka set off for Cirque du Soleil and passed through “Bridgerton,” he’d be ready for “Wicked.” But the movie musical’s costumes aren’t just a mashup of looks we’ve seen before; they’re an elegant reinvention of iconic “Wizard of Oz” references and a joyous summation of its designer’s career.
The wildly colorful and complex costumes of “Wicked” are the work of Paul Tazewell, whose designs for another beloved musical, “West Side Story,” earned him an Oscar nomination in 2022. He became the first Black male to earn that honor, and with “Wicked” he is favored to become the first to win it.
Tazewell, 60, brought all of his particularly relevant life experience to the job. He’s designed costumes for theater, dance, opera, film and television, earning recognition in each medium. He’s even designed “The Wiz” four times, starting in high school in Akron, Ohio.
“I made the costumes in the middle of our dining room on my mother’s Singer sewing machine,” he says. By 2016, he’d won an Emmy for “The Wiz! Live.”
“Wicked,” however, brought the designer creative challenges that his teenage self never could have imagined.
Tazewell had to synthesize the demands of the movie script, the L. Frank Baum book, the 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz,” the Broadway musicals “Wicked” and “The Wiz” — and mesh with director Jon M. Chu’s vision. He also needed to make the lead characters visually in conversation with each other, though Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is dark, earthy and green, while Galinda (Ariana Grande) is light, bubbly and pink.
Cynthia Erivo knows who she is and owns it proudly -- as does her ‘Wicked’ character Elphaba
The job required that he move to London for two years beginning in 2022. While there, he utilized artisans who embroidered costumes, made hats or developed textiles for “Bridgerton,” “The Crown,” “Queen Charlotte” and the London production of “Hamilton,” which in 2016 netted Tazewell a Tony Award.
To manage the monumental “Wicked” task, he divided to conquer. Tazewell staffed the costume department of sometimes 150 people to focus on characters or regions, such as Emerald City or Shiz University.
“It was like Santa’s workshop, literally,” says Tazewell, who was in Los Angeles for a recent Costume Designers Guild presentation and discussion of his work. “We had a long table where we would set things up. I’d look at any of the upcoming questions or upcoming issues, or look at fabrics.” Some days, he says, it looked like an assembly line. Workrooms were mapped by color.
“You go through the door of the Elphaba room, and it’s basically all black fabrics and textures. And then you bust through to the right to this other room, and it’s this explosion of pink and sparkles and lavender and everything that’s sheer and floating and full of butterflies that we’d laser-cut [for Galinda],” he says.
Throughout, Tazewell cleverly built in references to iconic elements. The striped socks of the Wicked Witch of the East show up as wavy versions in Shiz University uniforms. Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard of Oz mirrors the frock-coat silhouette from the original film. Swirls show up on robes and shoes, a nod to tornadoes, while Galinda’s circular cutouts and effervescent fabrics recall how her 1939 predecessor, Glinda, arrived in Munchkinland in a pink bubble.
Ariana Grande proves herself a ‘modern-day Lucille Ball’ with ‘Popular,’ the funniest number in ‘Wicked.’ The film’s creative team explains how it all came together.
Tazewell’s modern contributions added intricate clothing construction that injected intrigue and movement. Fabrics are variously folded like origami, appliqued, quilted, embroidered, beaded, gathered, pleated, printed, felted, dyed, etched, lasered and layered. Many techniques come together in the iconic pointy black hat for the future Wicked Witch of the West. Elphaba’s is made of crooked tiers of micro pleats that gather under the brim to resemble mushroom gills. It also collapses into itself, like a camping cup that squishes flat.
That element of transformation is becoming a Tazewell signature.
“I’ve always been fascinated with Japanese fans, the sculptural quality and the opening and closing of them, or of umbrellas, which is a similar technique. I was also obsessed with pop-up books,” he says. “There is a magical quality about going from one thing that is hidden to opening it up into a different shape. I’ve carried that into my work as I’ve matured as a designer.”
You can see it in action on the long gowns Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth wear in the movie to sing about the Grimmerie, a book of spells. With movement, their vertical skirt layers waft open, like the turning pages of a book. The designer likes to fold and pleat fabric to give it a kind of kinetic energy that adds bounce to clothing: It’s there in the pleated overlays on Shiz student uniforms that swirl when they dance.
Some of the references are inspired by fashion designers, such as Issey Miyake’s pleats, Vivienne Westwood’s and Christian Dior’s fitted jackets and Alexander McQueen’s exaggerated shoulders. The techniques borrow from couture craftsmanship and Hollywood magic. Some gowns were painstakingly embroidered by a solo artist using antique machines from the 1800s. One of Elphaba’s dresses was built from a puzzle of micro-pleated fabric swirled and invisibly hand-stitched onto dozens of pattern pieces. Galinda’s pink arrival gown used 20,000 beads that took artisans 225 hours to sew onto the bodice, while the skirt was assembled from spiraled cones of embellished, sheer pink fabric that were attached in tiers.
And there’s a second movie coming in November, which was filmed in conjunction with the first, adding yet another level of complexity to the design task.
“It was nonstop,” Tazewell says. “But I was also in that joyful spot where I’m in that creative place that has always been where I’m really myself.” That spot, it seems, is where he transforms — into the Wonderful Costume Wizard of Oz.
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