Featured Essays Wicked: For Good There Is Only One Explanation for Elphaba’s Cardigan in Wicked: For Good When you’re trying to make a scene really unsexy, add a drapey sweater, I guess? By Molly Templeton | Published on December 1, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share It’s the unsexy sartorial choice that astonished the Wicked world: the sweater in which Elphaba Thropp (Cynthia Erivo) wraps herself at a key moment in Wicked: For Good. “I’m Being Driven Insane by Wicked: For Good’s Sex Cardigan” says a Vulture headline. “What Is a Chunky Knit Doing in Wicked’s Sexiest Scene?” asks a headline at The Cut. People, of all places, has an Instagram post about it. “Perhaps the frumpy sex cardigan is the best possible metaphor for the film as a whole,” muses Them’s critic. (This is fair, actually.) I watched the “As Long As You’re Mine” sequence with a growing sense of incredulousness. I may even have muttered, “Is this really happening?” (Look, there were six other people in the theater, none of them anywhere near me. An exhausted Wicked-the-book lover can do a quiet mutter or two now and again.) This sequence is meant to be horny as fuck. At least we were warned that director Jon M. Chu did not understand the point of the scene at all.  The sex cardigan is distracting. It is cozy as hell. I would absolutely wear it. Maybe not to a treehouse tryst with the person I’m ostensibly in love with, but I’d wear it around the house for sure. That is a TV-marathon cardigan. An “I’m staying on the sofa all day and reading three books” cardigan. You could probably comfortably lie on the floor while wearing it, if you were having a bad day. But it’s not sexy. What it is, though, is handmade. The sex cardigan drove us so bananas that we went and created an origin story for it: Elphie made that damn thing herself. She’s proud of it! I would be, too! And there is evidence for this theory. In an interview with The Cut, brilliant, Oscar-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell said of Elphaba’s surprisingly cozy forest home “And in that treehouse, she has the ability to re-create her life. She has a loom and she has ways of knitting and sewing. She’s creating furniture for herself, and she’s creating a life and a space of wellness and safety for herself.” She has ways of knitting and sewing. See? What has she been doing for the past year(ish)? Making cozy garments! One can’t wear shredded black all the time.  Tazewell is even more clear about this in a conversation with Harper’s Bazaar: Her tree house becomes a reflection of how she wants to live and the freedom that she wants to live within. It also allows for her to not be guarded, to feel comfortable in her own skin. There are elements that give us clues that she’s weaving her own fabric and possibly spinning her own thread. She’s knitting a garment to be her robe. She is searching for creature comforts in the middle of the forest, and who knows what access she has with the animals that are in the forest as well? When you think about her life in Munchkinland and how she was raised, it comes out of this Victoriana sensibility. Then you think about the world of embroidery and lace making and knitting from that time, where handwork and creating in your home was prioritized. It provided creativity. There’s no television or cell phones there, and so really it was expanding on that as an idea and allowing for Elphaba to be really good at all of this stuff. This activity is not, I must add, canon in Gregory Maguire’s novel. There, only the amas and Elphaba’s Nanny busy themselves with knitting. However, the cardigan/knitting project itself could have its origin in the text. It’s a stretch, but it’s not like she never wears messy knits. In a section written from Boq’s point of view—Boq is notably less annoying in the novel than he is in the musical—Maguire writes: It was his first time to see the funny green jumping bean since arriving back in Shiz. And there she was, on time, arriving at the café as requested, in a gray ghost of a dress, with a knitted overpull fraying at the sleeves, and a man’s umbrella, big and black and lancelike when rolled up. Elphaba sat down with a graceless fromp, and examined the scroll. “A knitted overpull fraying at the sleeves” is not exactly how I would describe the sex cardigan, but it’s not all that far off. Anyway. She made it herself, and it’s comforting, and it still doesn’t belong in that scene, but at least she didn’t spend too much on it in some ridiculous Emerald City boutique. Elphie, can you make me one?[end-mark] The post There Is Only One Explanation for Elphaba’s Cardigan in <i>Wicked: For Good</i> appeared first on Reactor.