Why Aren’t the Iconic Ruby Slippers in Wicked Red? The Movie’s Costume Designer Explains (Exclusive)

If you’ve ever seen the original Wizard of Oz movie (and even if you haven’t), you’re likely familiar with Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

They’re kind of iconic.

The sparkling red sequin shoes are the ones Dorothy takes from the Wicked Witch of the East after a house falls on her when she arrives in Oz with Toto. And, those are the very same shoes that help Dorothy get back home when she clicks her heels together three times.

Somewhere between six and 10 pairs were created for Judy Garland to wear in the 1939 film, and only a few are known to still exist — one is on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, and another is going up for auction next month. BBC estimates they’ll fetch a cool few million dollars.

When Paul Tazewell, costume designer for Wicked, was creating his own shoes for this year’s film, he went back to the original source material for inspiration. And it turns out, Baum never intended for those shoes to be red at all.

“They’re not ruby,” Tazewell tells PEOPLE of the original shoes. “In the book, they were these odd little silver boots.”

But because The Wizard of Oz was made in technicolor for 1939, the studio wanted to take advantage of the ability to showcase the many colors it had at its disposal, so Gilbert Adrian, costume designer for MGM, strayed outside the 1900 novel by L. Frank Baum.

Tazewell took the original book concept as his starting point and went from there.

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“There’s the idea of Cinderella and the glass slipper, and then it’s like how we make shoes a myth and how we’ve indulged them into our fantasy fairytale storytelling,” he says. “In the book they were silver shoes, and then they became crystal and silver shoes.”

Tazewell incorporated swirls and jewels into the shoes that actress Marissa Bode (who plays Nessarose, the character who later became the Wicked Witch of the East) would wear in Wicked, and in doing so, created something entirely new and unique to this movie.

But his silver shoes simultaneously pay homage to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West — the book that Wicked on Broadway and the Wicked movie are both based on. Maguire stayed true to Baum’s storytelling as well, writing in his 1995 novel that the shoes were iridescent beads and gifted to Nessarose.

In Maguire’s Wicked, Glinda enchants the shoes to help Nessarose (who is in a wheelchair prior to this point) walk, and when the spell is cast, they become red. In the Broadway show, Elphaba is the one to cast the spell!

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If you’re getting confused by all the shoes and all the colors, all you need to know is that sometimes the shoes are red, and sometimes the shoes are silver!

The wonderful world of Oz has many iterations that weave in and out of each other, but they all tie back together in some way or another. The Wicked ruby slippers may not be red, but they are truly inspired by Baum’s original work from more than 100 years ago, which makes them the perfect shoes for Dorothy when she needs to find her way home!