Lost for decades, Dorothy’s dress from ‘Oz’ up for sale after being found in shoebox

 It’s 1 of the most recognizable outfits in American movie historical past, the blue-and-white checked gingham costume a younger Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in the vintage 1939 film “The Wizard of Oz.”

For decades, a person of the variations of the dress Garland wore in the movie was assumed shed at Catholic College of The usa, where it experienced been specified to someone in the drama office in the early 1970s. But the clearing out of some business office litter last yr led to the locating of the dress in an aged shoebox, and now it is headed for the auction block.

When she to start with saw it, “all I could assume about was viewing the film when I was a kid and growing up with” it, said Jacqueline Leary-Warsaw, dean of the school of audio, drama and artwork at Catholic University, in Washington, D.C. “In a way it was like I was wanting at my past childhood.”

She and other people are hopeful that nostalgia element will appear into perform when the costume goes up for sale at Bonhams “Classic Hollywood: Film and Television” auction on Might 24 in Los Angeles, wherever it has a presale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. Bonhams has the gown on exhibit this 7 days at the auction house’s New York place right before it is despatched to California for general public watch and then auction.

Helen Corridor, director of popular society for Bonhams, reported that the marketplace for memorabilia, and movie costumes in particular, is robust, and that “The Wizard of Oz” is a cultural touchstone.

People today “very much try to remember the very first time they observed the movie, the impact it experienced on their lives,” she said. The movie is renowned for its tunes, its dialogue and its visuals, notably when Dorothy goes from drab, sepia-coloured Kansas to gloriously multicolored Oz.

There was much more than one of the costume designed for Garland whilst filming. Corridor mentioned that 4 are regarded to exist and that only two, such as the just one identified at Catholic University, are with the blouse she wore beneath. Bonhams sold the other a person with a blouse at an auction in 2015 for far more than $1.5 million.

(There are also some surviving pairs of the ruby slippers Garland wore, with one particular pair in the assortment at the Smithsonian.)

The rediscovered dress experienced at first been specified to Father Gilbert Hartke, who was then head of the university’s drama section, in 1973 by actress Mercedes McCambridge, Leary-Warsaw reported, while it is not clear how McCambridge came to have it.

In some way, in the yrs that adopted, the department shed track of the costume right up until it became “something that people today experienced considered was just a fantasy,” she stated. Last yr, in the course of preparations for a renovation, a bag made up of the shoebox was opened, and there it was — however how it acquired to in which it ended up stays a secret, Leary-Warsaw mentioned.

The gown was in excellent issue, apart from a piece that had been cut away, while the shirt was additional fragile.

In studying the dress, it was decided that Garland wore it in the film in the scene wherever she is confronted in a castle by a threatening Wicked Witch of the West.

The faculty determined to auction it off as a substitute of preserving it, and designs to use the proceeds from the auction sale to generate a complete-fledged movie method in the drama office.