On February 13th, the new adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, was released in theatres. In anticipation of the film, Vogue released An Exclusive First Look at the Wild and Wonderful Costumes of Wuthering Heights, which drew mixed reactions from film buffs, historians, and fans of the original novel.
Now that the film is out, there is continued discussion on the effectiveness of costuming. But, before we dismiss artistic choices as historical carelessness, it is worth understanding what the creative team behind the film were trying to accomplish.
The novel was always dramatic
The film is an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, a Victorian-era novel that rejects many of the era’s values. Intense emotions, including obsession, grief, rage, and desire, drive the story. Because the novel prioritizes emotion, atmosphere, and psychological intensity over historical detail, the director likely faced a choice: either faithfully recreate the novel’s elements or expressively reinterpret it.
The creative team behind the film did not fully embrace period-piece styles. This has sparked online discourse on the film and its credibility as an adaptation. But what could inaccurate historical costuming mean for the film adaptation of Wuthering Heights?
a “fever dream” by design
Costume designer and two-time Oscar winner Jaqueline Durran worked alongside director Emerald Funnell on Wuthering Heights. Funnell explained to Vogue that “Wuthering Heights was always envisioned as a kind of fantastical fever dream—a contemporary take on the ’50s that gleefully mixes historical references with glitzy modernity.” This description clarifies costuming choices. The film does not seem to focus on a specific time period, and it alludes to a twist in the classic.
Durran goes on to explain that the film’s dates are all confused. The film is “not representing a moment in time at all”. The creative team went in a direction that favours “images and styles … for each character,” each character’s uniqueness, rather than historical accuracy. This striking choice may better represent the emotional complexity of the original text.
In interviews, the film has been explained as a “fever dream” deliberately resisting historical precision. The film is explained not to favour historical accuracy. Clothing in the novel Wuthering Heights is not about ornamentation but about class boundaries, belonging, and aspiration.
a tradition of reinvention
Other classic literature turned to film often takes far more drastic liberties than stylistic costuming choices. A well-known example is Clueless, which openly reimagines Emma by Jane Austen in a thoroughly modern context. Clueless is a successful literary adaptation because it embraces reinterpretation over replication.
Similarly, the film 10 Things I Hate About You draws on classical literature, expressly The Taming of the Shrew. The film completely abandons Elizabethan language, social structures, dynamics, setting, and dress. Still, like Clueless, it showcases how drastic stylistic and contextual changes can make classic texts more accessible to contemporary audiences without erasing their thematic foundations.
Costuming in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette has also been driven by historical accuracy and offers an important point of comparison in the context of Wuthering Heights; Coppola blends silhouettes with modern sensibilities. Famously, the film features a shot of a pair of pastel Converse sneakers among slip dresses, corsets, and gowns in Marie’s dressing room. The shot provides context for the main character through costuming and contrast, breaking historical immersion but not undermining credibility; it was an artistic choice that reinforces Coppola’s portrayal of Marie Antoinette.
The adaptations mentioned lack period accuracy and are more concerned with translating emotional truth than with recreating history. Costume becomes a narrative device, rather than a historical one, used to convey feelings and timeliness by creating visual languages that serve the story’s truth. Wuthering Heights follows this playbook.
Blending centuries
Wuthering Heights costumes reference the Elizabethan, Georgian, and Victorian eras and even draw inspiration from the 1950s, with vintage Mugler and McQueen featured on mood boards. The film nods to the period subtly but remains grounded in a stylized aesthetic, Akin to a 1950s costume drama rather than something historically accurate to the 1770s.
This approach is evident in how Cathy evolves throughout the narrative.
Cathy in Red: Costume as an Emotional Narrative device
Upon the film’s release, it is clear that the adaptation is loose and surreal, and that costumes are used to showcase characters’ arcs and the narrative. The costumes reveal Cathy’s arc specifically, and the film uses colours throughout to convey her story.
When she first appears on screen, she is shown in earthy, natural and worn clothing. However, her costumes change throughout the film, and she is later seen especially in red, the film’s signature colour.
The colour red conveys feelings of love, passion, and pain, connecting stylistic choices to the narrative.
When Cathy is immersed in Mr. Linton’s world, her costumes become more ridiculous and dream-like, reflecting the sense that she is living her ‘dream’ but conveying a feeling of being trapped, all while looking striking and embracing the look of an old Hollywood starlet.
“It is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.”
To clarify the intention behind the film’s costuming, Director Funnell has emphasized that her adaptation is not meant to be definitive, but interpretive. She has noted that even the film title appears branded in quotation marks. The film is self-aware and distant from strict fidelity.
She is quoted as saying, “I’m making a version of it, a version that I remember reading that isn’t quite real, and there’s a version that I wanted stuff to happen that never happened, so it is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.”
In interviews, the film has been explained as a “fever dream,” deliberately resisting historical precision in favour of emotional intensity. Rather than recreating a fixed moment in time, Fennel’s adaptation aims to capture the novel’s feeling. In Brontë’s text, clothing is not about ornament but about class boundaries, belonging, and aspiration.
Freeing the costume from strict historical accuracy allows the film to bring those same tensions to light. Using dress not as decoration but as an emotional, symbolic language.
Emotional truth over accuracy
Wuthering Heights reminds us that fidelity in adaptation is not about replication. The film proves that costumes need not be historically accurate to be historically significant—they need only capture the truth of the story being told. When a film honours the emotional core of its source material, it needs only to serve the emotional truth of the story. When a film captures that essence of truth, it remains faithful in the ways that matter most.