Ruby Slippers are the magic footwear worn by Dorothy Gale as played by Judy Garland in the 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz and Fairuza Balk in the 1985 Disney movie Return to Oz.

In L. Frank Baum's original novel, Dorothy wears the silver shoes of the Wicked Witch of the East. Screenwriter Noel Langley changed the silver shoes to ruby to take advantage of the Technicolor process used for the movie. Like all the costumes in the film, the shoes were designed by Gilbert Adrian, the head of MGM's costume department. Sequins were hand-sewn onto a chiffon surface to give the shimmering effect. At first the costume department had tried merely to spray leather shoes red, though that effort failed.

Controversy arose years later, about the authenticity of surviving pairs of ruby slippers. One pair was given away by MGM in a promotional contest in 1939 (to Roberta Jeffries Bauman). Another pair was sold at auction on 17 May 1970, along with many of the remaining MGM props. The price for that pair of shoes was $15,000.^[1] That pair is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.

The trouble lies in the fact that there was never any single authentic pair of ruby slippers. Crucial props and costumes in Hollywood films were made in multiple copies; Judy Garland's Dorothy costume was actually six blue-and-white checked gingham dresses. Mervyn LeRoy, the Oz film's producer, said of the ruby slippers, "We must have had five or ten pairs of those shoes."^[2] One surviving pair is size 4B, Garland's shoe size; another is size 6, the shoe size of Garland's stand-in Bobbie Koshay.

There are at least four pairs known to exist today. The pair that was given away as a contest prize in 1939 sold for $165,000 in 1988, and for $660,000 in 2000. One pair was stolen from a display at the 2005 Judy Garland Festival in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

Interestingly, the ruby slippers used in the film were more burgundy than red. The 3-strip Technicolor process used in 1939 could not reproduce colors with true-to-life fidelity, and various compromises were made out of necessity. Shoes that were actually red would have photographed as orange.

Salman Rushdie wrote a short story titled "The Auction of the Ruby Slippers." In his book The Ruby Slippers of Oz (1989), Rhys Thomas writes about four extant pairs of the shoes.

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