A version of Dorothy’s dress from ‘Oz’ goes up for sale
3 min readNEW YORK — It is 1 of the most recognizable outfits in American film background, the blue-and-white checked gingham costume a youthful Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in the typical 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
For many years, a person of the variations of the gown Garland wore in the motion picture was assumed misplaced at Catholic College of America, in which it had been supplied to anyone in the drama department in the early 1970s. But the clearing out of some workplace litter last year led to the getting of the gown in an outdated shoebox, and now it really is headed for the auction block.
When she initial observed it, “all I could feel about was watching the motion picture when I was a baby and expanding up with” it, said Jacqueline Leary-Warsaw, dean of the faculty of tunes, drama and art at Catholic University, in Washington, D.C. “In a way it was like I was seeking at my previous childhood.”
She and others are hopeful that nostalgia issue will appear into play when the costume goes up for sale at Bonhams “Typical Hollywood: Film and Television” auction on Could 24 in Los Angeles, the place it has a presale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bonhams has the gown on exhibit this week at the auction house’s New York place right before it is despatched to California for public perspective and then auction.
Helen Corridor, director of well known lifestyle for Bonhams, explained that the industry for memorabilia, and film costumes in particular, is potent, and that The Wizard of Oz is a cultural touchstone.
People “incredibly a great deal don’t forget the first time they saw the film, the outcome it experienced on their life,” she reported. The movie is renowned for its tunes, its dialogue and its visuals, significantly when Dorothy goes from drab, sepia-coloured Kansas to gloriously multicolored Oz.
There was far more than a person of the costume produced for Garland though filming. Corridor stated that four are regarded to exist and that only two, which includes the a person observed at Catholic University, are with the blouse she wore underneath. Bonhams bought the other a person with a blouse at an auction in 2015 for extra than $1.5 million.
(There are also some surviving pairs of the ruby slippers Garland wore, with a single pair in the selection at the Smithsonian.)
The rediscovered costume had initially been supplied to Father Gilbert Hartke, who was then head of the university’s drama office, in 1973 by actress Mercedes McCambridge, Leary-Warsaw reported, though it is not apparent how McCambridge came to have it.
Somehow, in the decades that followed, the section missing keep track of of the costume right until it grew to become “something that folks had believed was just a fantasy,” she mentioned. Final calendar year, throughout preparations for a renovation, a bag containing the shoebox was opened, and there it was — although how it got to in which it ended up stays a secret, Leary-Warsaw stated.
The gown was in excellent issue, apart from a piece that experienced been cut away, although the blouse was more fragile.
In looking into the dress, it was identified that Garland wore it in the movie in the scene the place she is confronted in a castle by a threatening Wicked Witch of the West.
The faculty made a decision to auction it off in its place of trying to keep it, and options to use the proceeds from the auction sale to produce a complete-fledged movie program in the drama office. 
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