On Valentine’s Day, I sat in a dark theater, watching the previews before the main attraction (Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights) with my partner. I was surrounded by many celebrating the holiday — with the intention of consuming a story about love — and that it most certainly was. I could talk about star-crossed lovers and controversial directorial choices, but what romanced me the most is something often overlooked in a film review — the costumes.
A luscious explosion of colors awaits, each distinct to a particular character in the film. It is difficult to miss the dynamic changes in the saturation and intensity of the hues as the emotional arc of the character evolves. With Margot Robbie’s Catherine Earnshaw in reds reminiscent of blood and passion, the audience is flung into the mindset of yearning for a fantastic and unattainable love.
Costume designer Jacqueline Durran channeled not only the Victorian period of the novel’s origin, but several other historic eras as inspiration for each character. While Robbie is engulfed in the glamour of fashionable women captured in the surviving portraiture of the Georgian, Victorian, and Elizabethan periods, she also dons costumes imbued with contemporary flair (think Thierry Mugler and Alexander McQueen). Durran has achieved a succession of looks that you want to rip off the screen and tape to your wall for posterity.
Fans of a Harry Styles-coded asymmetric earring will have something to write fan fiction about with the suave and more accurately Georgian costumes of Elordi’s Byronic-era Heathcliff. Durran paints Cathy’s love interest as a vessel for her fire of passion. The supporting cast of characters fill in the aesthetic gaps in the color spectrum, with Shazad Latif’s Edgar Linton donning creamy shades that pair perfectly with the cake-icing yellows of Allison Oliver’s Isabella Linton. These lemony splashes paint a vibrant counterbalance to Heathcliff’s stark, monochromatic palette. Isabella’s silhouettes offer a sense of childlike wonder, with frills, ribbons, ruffles, and puffed sleeves, all chattering away to tell you that she is a young, innocent yet curious little creature.
In a story obsessed with doomed romance, it is Durran’s costumes that pulse most vividly with life — proving that sometimes the truest love affair in the theater isn’t between the characters on screen, but between color, cloth, and the watching eye. Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is ready to be consumed — it is a savory soup of colors, feelings, and auditory stimulation, and it certainly turns on the faculties both expected and otherwise.
