Why does one of the male actors in the show “Wicked” wear a skirt?”
Susan Hilferty’s costumes for Wicked “My goal was to create a third world, a world that we considered to be a parallel universe,” she explains. “It’s a world where animals can talk, so we know it’s not our world. It’s a world that deals with a kind of inventiveness, things that we might call magic. 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.” Hilferty’s focus was twofold: to help tell the story of the two women, and to provide a sense of the world of Oz. She looked at fashions around the turn of the century, which was when Baum wrote the books, for inspiration. She describes the resulting costumes as “twisted Edwardian.” “I found what I was doing was almost designing each idea twice; I had an idea that w
