If stylist Andrew Mukamal helped set in motion the phenomenon of method dressing–a form of dress that directly nods to themes and motifs drawn from a performer’s role—while styling Margot Robbie for the Barbie red carpets in 2023, his treatment of Wuthering Heights is a little less literal and a little more, well, literary. Rather than plonking Robbie into historically accurate petticoats and panniers–as he did for the Barbie press tour, which saw the actor pivot and pose in a series of life-size recreations of vintage Barbie doll looks—his current approach is to lift individual passages from the novel and translate them into outfits.
Take the duo’s two most recent creations: a feathered minidress, and a feathered tank top from Victoria Beckham’s spring 2026 collection—a not inconsiderable show of support amid the designer’s recent run of press—inspired, as Mukamal suggested on Instagram, by a scene in chapter 12 of the novel, in which a lovesick Cathy, slipping into delirium, violently tears apart a pillow, “pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made, and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species”. It’s a more interpretive referencing of the source text—a poetic license—that feels in line with costume designer Jacqueline Durran’s gleefully ahistorical approach to fashioning the film. (“It’s not realistic or unrealistic”, she said, for a Bavarian milkmaid gown to wind up on the 19th-century Yorkshire moors.)
Which makes sense. In film and culture editor Radhika Seth’s cover profile of Margot Robbie in the January 2026 issue of British Vogue, she notes how the length of Mukamal’s process began to rival the film’s own production schedule: visiting the Wuthering Heights set, absorbing the many references shared by Durran and director Emerald Fennell, even trawling eBay for vintage copies of the novel itself. But perhaps the more revealing detail from the interview was that Mukamal had also been tasked with finding Robbie an outfit for a Cathy-themed bachelorette party her friends are planning to celebrate the film’s Valentine’s Day release. I do wonder whether that, too, might have served as a brief for the entire press tour. It would certainly explain the velvet choker, Roberto Cavalli mini and f***-a** Christian Louboutin heels Robbie wore to one press junket, and the near-nude McQueen dress and rosary-bead heels she later wore to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
