Paul Tazewell Reveals Wicked Costume Design Secrets That Demand a Rewatch

Audiences around the globe can marvel at Paul Tazewell's talent as a costume designer, thanks to the recent home entertainment release of Wicked: For Good. But Broadway fans have been privy to Tazewell's creations long before his historic 2025 Best Costume Design Oscar win for the first Wicked film. A two-time Tony winner, Tazewell is behind Hamilton's 18th-century silhouettes and Death Becomes Her's glamorous, illusion-heavy gowns. His other Tony-nominated works include The Color Purple, In the Heights, Memphis, A Streetcar Named Desire, Ain't Too Proud, MJ and Suffs.

Tazewell's colleague Susan Hilferty designed the iconic costumes for Wicked on Broadway. "We are dear friends," he told Broadway.com during a Wicked: For Good press event. "I came to her and I wanted her blessing, because I was going to take off on a world that she had originally had a part in." The Wizard of Oz 1939 film, the stage production of Wicked and even his own work on 2015's The Wiz Live! may all be loosely connected, but Tazewell points out that "each of those stories, the way that we tell those stories, becomes specific in its own right."

While both Wicked movies were filmed at the same time, knowing they would be released separately meant creating a clear divide between where the first film ends and the second picks up. For Tazewell, "the beauty of seeing two films" is the ability to watch the characters develop over time. "We are first introduced to Glinda and Elphaba, what their versions of uniforms are and how they evolve in school," he says, "how their silhouettes shift and change, soften, become more like each other. All the way to the very end of part one and how that's rejected."

The purposeful updates to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande's costumes at the beginning of Wicked: For Good alone deserve a careful rewatch. At the end of the first film, when Elphaba jumps out of the window for "Defying Gravity," Tazewell notes that "she's in her very best dress and completes that silhouette with the cape and her hat."

When viewers first see Elphaba in Wicked: For Good, her tunic is made from the remnants of that same dress. The trousers she wears were also seen in the first film. "The hat that she's worn has expanded slightly through magic, it's become more elevated. The sweeping coat is an upcycle of the raincoat that we've seen her in when she and Fiyero take the lion cub to the forest." Tazewell's task when dressing Elphaba for the second film was about "making sense of what happens when a woman goes into exile and continues to evolve and mature. And being able to show that through clothing was hugely exciting as a costume designer."

While less subtle, Glinda's costume changes also clearly correlate with her character's inner turmoil in Part Two. "We go from a girl graduating college directly into being put in place as a political force of good—or seeming good—and how she develops as this propagandist figure," Tazewell says. "She's manipulated by beauty and elegance." He adds that her traveling device, the bubble, is another "archetype of goodness, reflective of Glinda from the 1939 film." For both of the leads, Tazewell focused on "tapping into nostalgia and archetypes of how we see goodness and wickedness." But thanks to his new designs, "they also form those in very original ways."

Tazewell's work on Wicked may be done—though we predict a second Oscar nomination for the designer in the near future—but he stays booked and busy on Broadway. Next up, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, directed by Debbie Allen and starring Taraji P. Henson and Cedric the Entertainer. While Tazewell is no stranger to designing period pieces, this latest project is an entirely different undertaking from that of the wonderful world of Oz. "What's beautiful about being a costume designer is that I have the ability to tell many different stories," he says. "These two [Wicked films] are based in huge fantasy, the fantasy that has become part of our culture." August Wilson's Joe Turner, set in 1911, "will be a turn of the century silhouette. It's specific to the community of Pittsburgh. It will be a joy to be able to design very real costumes that are very reflective of the characters, that will speak to a very heartfelt story as well."

Get tickets to Joe Turner's Come and Gone!

Wicked: For Good is now available to buy or rent on digital.