Just in time for Valentine’s Day, another Margot Robbie movie featuring swoon-worthy moments is on the way in the form of Wuthering Heights. The Emerald Fennell movie promises to be no ordinary entry amongst the upcoming book adaptations that lie within the 2026 movie schedule. Fennell is set to take a lot of liberties with the source material, and the fashion. As you might have noticed already, the movie is getting creative with Catherine’s wardrobe, but I wasn’t expecting to learn the undertaking was Barbie level.
The Wild Amount Of Costumes Made For Margot Robbie For Wuthering Heights
Jacqueline Durran is Wuthering Heights’ costume designer, who not only did Barbie but also brought her talents to other iconically-stylish movies like The Batman, Atonement, the live-action Beauty and the Beast and Little Women. When speaking to Vogue all about the costuming of Wuthering Heights, she revealed how many costumes she made for Margot Robbie alone:
With overlaps and reuse, we created between 45 and 50 costumes just for Cathy.
That’s an awfully lot of costumes for one character to have! I looked back at the recent trailer after reading this and counted like 13 looks for Robbie’s character alone so, now I can totally see it. However, I wouldn’t necessarily expect an adaptation of this classic novel to be so heavy on the costume design. Clearly, Fennell wanted to make the movie’s fashion a huge touchpoint, and the references to real-life fashion varied.
Our references ranged from Elizabethan through to Georgian and Victorian, and from paintings and historical dress to contemporary fashion and representations of period costume in 20th-century films. The challenge was to distill that into looks that told the story that Emerald wanted to tell.
Despite the movie itself taking place sometime in the 1800s, the production’s costume department made a concerted effort to pull from all sorts of inspirations. This includes women like Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone With The Wind movie or famous Neo-Rococo painting A Swiss Girl from Interlaken from Franz Xaver Winterhalter, and even references from current fashion magazines. Given what I know about the movie’s unique approach celebrity fashion, I'm definitely intrigued.
How Does This Large Number Of Costumes Compare To Barbie's?
What’s rather wild about the reveal of how many Wuthering Heights costumes there are is how it measures up to Barbie. Per the movie’s hair and makeup designer Ivana Primorac, here’s the amount of costumes Margot Robbie had:
Barbie Margot had more than 30 costume and hair changes.
Of course, it would make sense for Barbie of all character to have a ton of costume changes. Still, what’s crazy is how Wuthering Heights might even have more costumes than that Greta Gerwig-helmed flick! (We just don’t know how many of the costumes factors into the overlaps and reused). Someone is going to have to ask Durran at some point, because it would be interesting to know for sure if Robbie’s Cathy or Barbie have more costumes appear on screen.
Following the filming of her and Gerwig's 2023 fantasy film, Margot Robbie’s stylist also put together a lot of incredible Barbie-inspired pieces for the press tour. So, of course, I’m curious as to how much method dressing Robbie will be doing this time around.
Check out Margot Robbie’s various costumes when Wuthering Heights arrives in theaters on February 13.
