Paper: Coolest Person in the Room: Paul Tazewell

Photography by Diego Villagra Motta

Story by Joan Summers

Styling by Angelina Cantu

Grooming by Kirk Cambridge-Del Pesche

For our series Coolest Person in the Room, we pinpoint all the people whose energy is contagious regardless of their following count or celebrity. For this edition, we caught up with Paul Tazewell, Oscar and Tony winning costume designer and one of the brilliant minds behind the world of Wicked: For Good.

What was the first piece that you ever remember designing, even if it was before you were a professional costume designer?

Oh gosh. The first piece might've been a jester costume that I designed for a play that I was in middle school. I remember it was red and gold taffeta from JoAnn’s Fabrics, and it had a hat that had two curved pieces, two spirals. That was the first. I was interested in clothing early, early on, and whether it was dressing dolls or just playtime out of a box, that creativity was part of my family all of the time. My first full on design was for a production of The Wiz. That was when I was a junior in high school, so I designed the costumes for that, and then I was also in that production because at the time I wanted to be a performer.

It sounds like you’ve had this lifelong connection to The Wizard of Oz. Was that on your mind when you first got the job on Wicked, that you had started with the production of The Wiz so long ago?

My career has been, and probably my life overall has been, a series of full circle events. I think it has been in my life since before that time that I was talking about in middle school, because we would watch The Wizard of Oz on TV every year, and the inspiration and magic that incited in me was palpable. I remember how magical going from sepia tone to technicolor in the film really set a tone for how I see magic making in performance. I've carried that into my design since, and worked to recreate the same kind of feeling in other ways — really making note of and paying attention to what insights that kind of magical feeling in people.

Read the interview here: https://www.papermag.com/paul-tazewell-wicked-interview