With Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Wicked, on which the successful Broadway musical and now duo of feature films are based, The Wicked Witch of the West was given a name – Elphaba – and a backstory that elicits empathy for an outcast who was branded a villain for standing up for those less fortunate. In reclaiming the witch as a misunderstood character and, along with aspirational pop cultural representations such as Bewitched’s Samantha and Prue, Piper, Phoebe and Paige Halliwell of the 1990s series Charmed, the conical hat becomes a lot less sinister.
It’s also partly thanks to Academy Award-winning Wicked costume designer Paul Tazewell, who has reinterpreted the “hideodeous” hat, as Glinda calls it, to better reflect Elphaba’s relationship to the Earth. “It is reflective and nostalgic of a silhouette that we recognise, but it is made into its own thing with how it spirals,” Tazewell told The Cut.
UniversalCostume designer Paul Tazewell has reinterpreted the “hideodeous” hat for the new film Wicked: For Good (Credit: Universal)
As Wicked reexamines the wicked-witch trope, it can be greatly credited with softening the scariness of the conical hat. After all, as Kounine contends, there’s nothing inherently horrifying about it. It’s just an object open to interpretation that we imbue with meaning through centuries of mythology passed down through art and stories – and the meanings of these myths change over time.
Some contemporary pagans see the hat as a conductor of energy, while children still clamour for it during the spooky season. In fact, the witch’s hat was Google’s most popular Halloween costume in 2021 – before Wicked mania set in. Just as woodcuts, portraiture and fairytales have influenced the modern material culture of the conical hat, so too will today’s iteration inform future generations’ understanding.
