Having a little piece of cinema history at home is one of the great satisfactions of genre lovers who attend auctions held around the world. Thus, objects such as the ‘Náufrago’ ball or classic costumes such as Indiana Jones or Harry Potter and, of course, vehicles like those that appear in the James Bond saga sell for quite high figures. This December the company Heritage Auctions one of the most iconic accessories of the musical genre went under the hammer, the shoes he wore Judy Garland in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ of 1939.
The initial estimates were about 3 million dollars, but the truth is that it ended up far exceeding this figure, reaching up to a whopping 28 million dollars (about 26.65 million euros at the current exchange rate)making these shoes some of the most expensive movie memorabilia ever sold at auction.
The shoes were stolen from a collector and returned by the FBI
Of all the pairs used in production, only four survived. Three of them were found by the costume designer Kent Warner when he was hired to organize the MGM auction in 1970. One of those pairs ended up in the Smithsonian and another was sold along with a Margaret Hamilton witch hat to Michael Shawwho was exhibiting them throughout the United States until they were stolen in 2005. Luckily for their owner, the FBI recovered this collector’s item in 2018. The agents, upon learning the story and knowing that there was another original pair in the Smithsonian, went to They once found it there to check if they were really the originals.

This pair is the one that appeared the most on the screen, as confirmed by studies carried out
Ruby Slippers They are a vintage pair of red silk heels. Innes Shoes Co. with uppers and heels covered in hand-made sequined silk georgette, lined in white leather and with red painted leather soles with orange felt adhered to the front base of each shoe. The bows are made from hand cut buckram fabric and are edged with rhinestones. Inside both Judy Garland’s name is engraved.
According to studies carried out, the pair in question was the one that appeared on the screen the most timesincluding such iconic close-up shots as the impact of the witch’s hands, the close-up at the gates of Oz, and the climactic heel-clicking scene that occurs near the end of the film.
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