Dorothy's Ruby Slippers
Gilbert Adrian (designer), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1903 to 1959) · 1938
A pair of small, glittering red shoes sits in a case at the entrance to Entertainment Nation, and almost everyone who walks past slows down. They are the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the shoes she clicks together three times to go home. In the original book by L. Frank Baum the slippers were silver; the studio changed them to red to show off the new Technicolor process, and the choice made them one of the most recognisable objects in the history of film. Several pairs were made for the production, and this is one of at least four that survive.
The shoes are ordinary white pumps dyed red, covered with about two thousand three hundred sequins each, with a butterfly-shaped bow of red glass beads and bugle beads at the toe. Look at the soles: they are covered in felt, sewn on so that the shoes would not clatter on the yellow brick road during the dance sequences. The sequins are a slightly orange red, because a true red photographed too dark under the film's lights. The heels are low, since Judy Garland was sixteen and playing a child. The right and left shoes are actually from two slightly different pairs.
The slippers were given to the museum in 1979 by an anonymous donor after being sold at an auction of studio props in 1970. By the twenty-first century the sequins had faded and the threads were breaking, and in 2016 the museum raised more than three hundred thousand dollars from the public in a crowdfunding campaign to conserve them and build the case you see, which keeps them at a steady, low light. They have been shown almost continuously since arriving, and a survey once found them the object most visitors came to see.
Did You Know? In 2016 the public paid for the conservation of the slippers through a crowdfunding campaign that reached its goal in a week.
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