Who is Paul Tazewell, Wicked designer and first black man to win an Oscar for costume design?

He had previously been nominated for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story

Paul Tazewell with the Oscar for Best Costume Design for Wicked. AFP

Costume designer Paul Tazewell has capped his successful awards season run with an Oscar. His Best Costume Design award for the blockbuster Wicked is also one for the record books: he's the first black man to win in that category.

“This is absolutely astounding. Thank you Academy for this very significant honour,” Tazewell, 60, said during his speech. “I'm the first black man to receive the costume design award for my work on Wicked. I'm so proud of this.”

Tazewell's work in Wicked had already earned a Critics Choice Award, Costume Designers Guild Award and a Bafta. He has been nominated for the Oscars in the category before – in 2022 for West Side Story – but lost to Jenny Beavan for her work in Cruella.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, the Ohio native is mostly known for his work on Broadway, working in predominantly African-American or Latino productions. He has created costumes for popular shows including The Color Purple, In the Heights, Memphis, A Streetcar Named Desire and Hamilton, for which he won a Tony Award in 2016.

He's also won an Emmy for The Wiz Live!, a TV adaptation of the Broadway musical The Wiz.

His first work in film was with the 2019 biographical Harriet, which starred Wicked actress Cynthia Erivo as American former slave and abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

Wicked, which explores the friendship between Elphaba, who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda the Good – characters from The Wizard of Oz – premiered in November and became one of the highest-grossing films of 2024. It has earned more than $729 million at the box office around the globe and a sequel scheduled to be released in November.

The musical was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Actress for Erivo and Best Supporting Actress of Ariana Grande. It won two awards, including best production design.

Tazewell spent two years crafting more than a thousand fantastical costumes for Wicked, moving to London in 2022 to work with artisans who embroidered costumes for period shows such as Bridgerton and The Crown. Some gowns were painstakingly embroidered by a solo artist using antique machines from the 1800s, he told the Los Angeles Times.

Tazewell is only the second black person to win in costume design. Ruth E Carter made Oscar history when she won for her work on Black Panther and then again with its sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Speaking backstage following his Oscar win, Tazewell said winning the award is the pinnacle of his career.

“I've been designing costumes for over 35 years, that has been on Broadway and now it's film,” he said. “There was never a black male designer who I saw that I could follow and see as an inspiration. But to realise now that it's actually me.”