The internet has been debating whether or not the themed Wuthering Heights red carpet fashion feels forced. Margot Robbie has been appearing at promotional events wearing hair, feathers, corsets, vintage John Galliano, and heels so high they look like AI creations more than actual footwear.

But whether you love it or not (a non-scientific Instagram poll I conducted suggests that most are genuinely enjoying it), it’s hard to argue that it’s not working. If the goal is to get people excited about the movie through these images and outfits, well, people are getting excited about the movie through these images and outfits!

Friends of mine who don’t normally go to the movies are texting their friends and trying to make plans to see it together. Margot Robbie’s red carpet looks have been parsed endlessly by talking heads on social media (“mothering heights,” said @romy_talks_fashion). The promotion has been as inescapable as Timothée Chalamet trying to win an Oscar.

Reviews of the film have starting coming out — and they’re pretty mixed. The New Yorker called it “extravagantly superficial,” while Vulture said it is director Emerald Fennell’s “dumbest movie” but that it also “may be her best to date.” (If you haven’t seen her 2020 film Promising Young Woman, run, don’t walk!) Yet plenty of people want to see Wuthering Heights anyway. It opens on Friday and is expected to earn $45 to $60 million at the box office opening weekend — a solid figure for this day and age.

It’s impossible to know what the tracking would have been without the method red-carpet dressing, but I suspect that interest in the movie would not have been nearly as high if Margot Robbie had worn her typical Chanel looks. She understands the powers of method dressing following her Barbie press tour, in which she was styled just like the doll for myriad appearances. (Barbie went on to gross nearly $1.5 billion at the box office.) Lots of factors go into making a movie a box office hit — Barbie’s marketing efforts certainly weren’t limited to red carpet styling — but ginning up press around red carpet attire seems to be an increasingly important one. These moments give fashion outlets and creators reason to cover movies on a sometimes daily basis, therefore exposing them to an audience who might not otherwise be aware of them.

If fashion can be used successfully to drive enough interest in a movie that people buy tickets to see it in a theater, maybe fashion is actually helping the entertainment industry more than Hollywood realizes. And in fact, maybe Hollywood isn’t doing nearly enough to utilize these red carpets and fashion at large to its advantage.

“Hollywood needs all the help we can get,” said Debra Birnbaum, editor-in-chief of award-season news and prediction site Gold Derby, on the latest episode of the Back Row podcast, citing the Netflix and Warner Bros. merger as one of the many challenges facing creatives. “Hollywood is challenged right now. There’s a lot of pressure.”

It used to be that fashion needed Hollywood stars to wear their dresses for publicity and sales (Valentino did this well, pivoting from dressing socialites like Jackie Onassis to actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Claire Danes). But now, Hollywood needs fashion to help create the marketing narratives required to sell a movie to an audience who largely aren’t inclined to go to theaters. Done effectively — meaning, whether you like it or not, you see it — method dressing is a reliable way to do that.

“People want to be part of the thing that everyone’s talking about. I think luxury marketing is part of that. I think a lot of people are going to go see Wuthering Heights because it looks so beautiful,” said Birnbaum.

Law Roach and Zendaya helped architect the modern formula for method dressing to promote a film. When Zendaya was making appearances for Spider-Man: Far From Home in 2019, she wore dresses, like her red and black Armani Privé gown, inspired by Spider-Man. She memorably repeated the formula for her promotional appearances for both Dune movies, also starring Timothée Chalamet. Both wore coordinating, futuristic looks, and I’m guessing many of us probably remember her tan Balmain dress, her Thierry Mugler robot suit, and the matching jumpsuits she and Timmy wore.

Timmy loves method dressing himself. It did not make a big impact on me at the time, but he wore a lot of purple to promote his 2023 movie Wonka. For Marty Supreme, he employed the color strategy again, wearing full orange suits that screamed at us to care from multiple premieres. Having Kylie Jenner at his side in a matching orange leather Chrome Hearts dress certainly didn’t hurt — but the media narrative was arguably about their orange clothes as much as them appearing together.

For Margot Robbie, her Wuthering Heights clothes work particularly well because we haven’t really seen her look like this before. She told Elle that her stylist Andrew Mukamel had been working on her wardrobe for “well over a year.”

“He came to set. He spent time with Jacqueline [Durran], our costume designer, and saw everything we were kind of creating at the time, which doesn’t normally happen.” He then dressed Robbie in feathered Victoria Beckham looks, for example, inspired by a passage in the book about a fit of madness, and a python dress inspired by text describing being hugged by a snake. Many of the social posts of Robbie in these looks have tens of thousands of likes and millions of views. It may not be possible to measure the total value of the press and social media mentions around these moments, but the fashion analytics firm Launchmetrics tries to do just that; it estimated that the “media impact value” of Louis Vuitton dressing Zendaya, Lisa, Sabrina Carpenter, and Doechii at the 2025 Met Gala, for instance, to be $55.2 million.

Method dressing can be such effective marketing that I’d argue studios should invest more in the fashion element of their films and create more of these press tours. The films on their own are rarely enough. Studios invest gobs of money in awards campaigns, but it’s not like award shows, with their dated formats and dwindling ratings, are getting butts in theater seats.

Yet these studios seem a bit stuck in the pre-internet era. They will typically cover stylists for a top star like Robbie, but Birnbaum said they’re still selective about who and what they will cover for the many appearances that go into an award show campaign. “It really depends on the negotiating power of the given talent and their lawyers and their agents and their managers,” she said. “But this stuff does get worked out in every contract — it is spelled out. And there is a lot of push and pull.”

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, given how crucial fashion has become to cinema, that brands are, in some cases, just making the movies themselves. Saint Laurent Productions, for instance, put out Emilia Perez, and LVMH has an arm dedicated to getting its brands into films. Tom Ford — one of fashion’s most celebrated creatives and ingenious marketers — pivoted to film many years ago.

“What's gonna get you out of your house and into a theater? Everything that elevates the craft and elevates the production,” said Birnbaum. “Especially when the industry is fighting so hard against AI. The fashion element is just one other thing that makes it [feel] really special.”