Susan hilferty costume designer biography

I looked at the original illustrations for the Wizard of Oz books — which is where the Edwardian influence comes from — but with a contemporary eye. The silhouette is twisted, asymmetrical.

Susan hilferty costumes

The idea was to distort the human figure, but in a high-fashion kind of way. The way the animals looked is also invented: the monkey-skins, faces, tails, the goats. In some cases I was acting like a fashion designer, much like Vivienne Westwood or Alexander McQueen, who will look at another time period and then exaggerate it and make it their own.

What aspects of the show did you keep in mind while bringing your costumes to life? SH: My goal was to create a third world, a world that we considered to be a parallel universe. The boundaries of the world are different than anything we know or are familiar with, but at the same time, the issues for the people of this world of Oz are in many cases the same kind of issues we deal with.

So I knew it had to be something that was of the imagination but in some ways had to thread back to things that we knew. SH: How to tell the story of these two girls, Glinda and Elphaba, in relation to this world.

Susan hilferty awards

It was a long, complicated journey, like learning a new language. How did you provide a sense of individuality, for instance, for the students in the scenes at Shiz University? SH: I designed with the idea that there was a Shiz store, where you could get a blazer or a skirt or a vest. There were like 10 pieces in the store.

And to provide variety, the jackets are all split up the back and laced together, so you could have one half of this jacket, and half of that and then lace them together. And then it was just a mixing of colors.