What Elphaba’s costume has to do with mushrooms, and more secrets from the costume designer of ‘Wicked’

“Wicked” costume designer Paul Tazewell is honored that stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo loved their costumes so much they took some of them home.

Grande and Erivo confessed they had taken props from set, including a “couple cardigans,” in an interview with TODAY.

“It’s a huge flattery,” Tazewell tells TODAY.com in an interview. “I embrace all that for both of them. Some of it was delicate where we were, ‘Well … we’re not sure we can give this to you.’ But they were able to take what they could.”

After spending two years together making the two-part “Wicked” musical adaptation, Tazewell says the cast and crew became a “family,” and he understands why Grande and Erivo would want to take a piece of set with them.

“It’s really a joy to be a part of it,” he says.

Below, Tazewell opens up about the making of the costumes for “The Wizard of Oz” prequel, which landed in theaters Nov. 22, and how their designs were in conversation with both the original movie and the new vision director Jon M. Chu creates.

In ‘Wicked,’ costumes are ‘armor’ for Elphaba and Glinda

It’s fitting that a movie about friendship would foster warm relationships behind-the-scenes, which have been front and center during the press tour.

Through his work as a costume designer, Tazewell helped establish the unique relationship at the center of “Wicked.”

“It’s a friendship that is created with putting these opposites together, or what appeared to be opposites, and how they balance each other,” he says.

On their first day at Shiz University, both Glinda (then Galinda) and Elphaba stand out among their classmates, who wear blue uniforms. Elphaba dons only black; Glinda is in pink everything.

“My hope was to create two women (who were) very intentional in how they present themselves,” he says. “Glinda is privileged. She sees the world through rose-colored glasses. That’s her armor, the same way that Elphaba uses black as her armor. There’s nothing accidental about what their styling is. I wanted for each of them to feel and and appear as beautiful as possible, even in how they represent themselves.”

Tazewell says Erivo and Grande played a role in creating their costumes. For example, Erivo tried on multiple versions of Elphaba’s hat before settling on the one she liked best.

“We had in-depth discussions early on what their emotional arc would be as it was reflected through the clothing,” he says.

Then, they had regular fitting throughout to make sure they could actually do what they needed to in the costumes.

“Cynthia was going to be flying. Ariana was going to be dancing,” he says.

Elphaba’s costume was inspired by … mushrooms?

Like the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz,” Elphaba only wears black. In “Wicked,” we find out why: She’s in mourning.

“It directly relates to her story,” Tazewell says.

After Elphaba is born green, her father forces her mother to eat milkweed during her second pregnancy. Seemingly as a result of the milkweed, Elphaba’s mother dies while giving birth to Elphaba’s younger sister, Nessarose.

“Elphaba is caught emotionally at that time. We have her carry that through. It defines why she then gravitates toward black as her defining color,” Tazewell says.

For the stage production, costume designer Susan Hilferty embedded color into Elphaba’s black dresses, a look she told Playbill in 2018 was inspired by “looking at the stones in earth and gems.”

Tazewell had a different Easter egg for his Elphaba, leaning more toward texture than color.

Since Elphaba is an advocate for the sentient animals of Oz, Tazewell incorporated the patterns of the natural world into her costumes.

“I started looking at fungus, mushrooms and trees. There was something that felt very magical about that about that idea,” he says.

Tazewell created her costumes to mimic spirals he was seeing on the underside of mushrooms, using specific fabrics and techniques like hand-felting. He tried to “imbue her with the sense of the organic.”

“In contrast with her ability to fly and manipulate gravity, keeping her grounded and connected to the Earth was really important story-wise,” he says.

Why Glinda’s bubble dress is pink, not blue

Glinda makes a show-stopping debut at the beginning of the “Wicked” movie and musical, flying into Munchkinland in a bubble, mirroring a scene in “The Wizard of Oz” in which Billie Burke’s Glinda pops out of a bubble to speak to the Kansan newcomer Dorothy.

In “The Wizard of Oz,” Glinda wears a bright pink puffy-sleeved gown, with a giant crown and wand.

But in the stage musical of “Wicked,” Glinda wears blue for the major moment,due to certain rights restrictions, according to Hilferty.

2024’s “Wicked,” however, was able to return to the original pink — that “perfect pink,” Tazewell says.

“My intent was for it to reference the original ‘Wizard of Oz’ dress but be different,” Tazewell says.

Grande’s dress has 20,000 beads and took 225 hours to make. He preserved the “perfect pink” from the original movie, then created a “new vision” for how we see Glinda.

The dress is also linked subtly to Elphaba’s clothes. Within the pattern is a spiral — a “thematic element” that “runs throughout the film,” Tazewell said on TODAY, seen in both of the friends’ clothes.

So while opposition in presentation, Elphaba and Glinda are linked — if you’re able to look closely enough.