With Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel Depraved, on which the profitable Broadway musical and now duo of characteristic movies are primarily based, The Depraved Witch of the West was given a reputation – Elphaba – and a backstory that elicits empathy for an outcast who was branded a villain for standing up for these much less lucky. In reclaiming the witch as a misunderstood character and, together with aspirational pop cultural representations comparable to Bewitched’s Samantha and Prue, Piper, Phoebe and Paige Halliwell of the Nineteen Nineties sequence Charmed, the conical hat turns into loads much less sinister.
It is also partly due to Academy Award-winning Depraved costume designer Paul Tazewell, who has reinterpreted the “hideodeous” hat, as Glinda calls it, to higher replicate Elphaba’s relationship to the Earth. “It’s reflective and nostalgic of a silhouette that we recognise, however it’s made into its personal factor with the way it spirals,” Tazewell instructed The Lower.
CommonAs Depraved reexamines the wicked-witch trope, it may be tremendously credited with softening the scariness of the conical hat. In any case, as Kounine contends, there’s nothing inherently horrifying about it. It is simply an object open to interpretation that we imbue with that means by means of centuries of mythology handed down by means of artwork and tales – and the meanings of those myths change over time.
Some up to date pagans see the hat as a conductor of power, whereas youngsters nonetheless clamour for it through the spooky season. In actual fact, the witch’s hat was Google’s hottest Halloween costume in 2021 – earlier than Depraved mania set in. Simply as woodcuts, portraiture and fairytales have influenced the trendy materials tradition of the conical hat, so too will at present’s iteration inform future generations’ understanding.
