Emerald Fennell’s retelling of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights finally hits cinema screens this weekend. Ever since the first set of photos were released, the anachronisms of the costumes have been central to the conversation.
As fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada put it: “The costume design for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights scandalised audiences with its freaky mix of Oktoberfest corseting meets 1950’s ballgowns meets futuristic liquid organza meets … Barbie?”
Viewers will soon be able to see Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran’s artistic vision.
The film plays fast and loose with period costume. Durran told Vogue: “We’re not representing a moment in time at all.” The mood board for Cathy’s costumes included Thierry Mugler, Alexander McQueen, a German milkmaid-style, and Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian and contemporary fashion. “The challenge was to distill that into looks that told the story that Emerald wanted to tell,” Durran says.
Storytelling – and spectacle – rather than a quest for historical accuracy lead Cathy to wear a dress in a material resembling cellophane on her wedding night, as if she’s a gift wrapped for her husband.
Wuthering Heights is part of a movement of costume design disobedient to historical accuracy in favour of creative freedom – and, arguably, fun. Costume designer Kate Hawley acknowledges her Oscar-nominated work on Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is also far from historically accurate. In Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2023 film Poor Things, set in the late Victorian era, Bafta-winning costume designer Holly Waddington used modern fabrics such as plastic and latex. She was, she told the Guardian, “playing with the period, not being slavish to it and playing with material qualities and pushing the boundaries of colours and textures”.
While there are forebears – in 2006, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, costume designer Milena Canonero placed a pair of Converse in the young queen’s wardrobe – Keith Lodwick, a theatre and film historian, cites the “Bridgerton effect” as a catalyst. From its first series in 2020, it’s been what he calls “a fantasy version of what we might think Regency is about”.
“Timing is everything,” says Lodwick. “Bridgerton came when we were having this global pandemic, and it was such escapism.” A moment for more expressive costume design often tallies with a wider world in need of fantasy. Referencing the 1940s film Pride and Prejudice, he says, “it’s very hard to pinpoint exactly what they’re recreating. It’s kind of Regency, but there’s a bit of 1840s-50s coming into it.” Regardless, for a 1940 audience, he says, “it was a huge success because it was an escape from the beginnings of the second world war.”
For some, this current mood for anachronisms is being overstated. Helen Walter, costume and visual historian at the Arts University Bournemouth, isn’t “sure it’s as big or as unprecedented a shift as people are making it out to be”. Costume design, she says, “often says much more about the people who are making it than the original setting … it always says something about the time that it’s being made.”
True historical accuracy is also not actually possible. According to Waddington: “Every period thinks that they’re doing the period, but they never really are [there are] always telltale signs.”
When Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell did Shakespeare in Love, she says “all of the silhouettes were the correct period cuts for all the clothing, but you can’t necessarily find period-accurate fabrics because they’re just not made in the same way now”. Powell remembers upsetting somebody by using an art deco lace to make an Elizabethan collar. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t care,” she says. “It looks good. And actually, this isn’t a documentary’.”
Costume, says Walter, “like any other art form is not immune to fashion and general cultural trends”. But designers will ultimately be led by the film in question. “I do whatever feels right for the piece,” says Powell. her upcoming work on The Bride! starring Jessie Buckley, is true to period but takes an anachronistic mood to “how clothes are worn more than the actual items of clothing”.
“It’s almost as if the punk that we know from, let’s say, the 70s or 80s, existed in the 1930s. What would it look like?” Often working with a lot of artistic licence, with the Bride! she “had free rein to have fun and go mad with it but all within the period.”
Some argue less accuracy-driven design creates a more distinct identity. It can, as in the case of Poor Things, lead to what Waddington calls a more “poetic response to the text” where “a striving for period correctness … would have given us a different tone.” For Powell, “when it’s done well, it’s fun. When it’s done badly I find it grating.”
Waddington disagrees with the idea that modern costumes help modern audiences connect to films set out of their period. “The brilliant thing about tackling a period story or text,” she says, “is often the opportunity to try to bring to life a period in time”. She describes it as giving an audience an experience akin to “time travel”.
Although, in the midst of this general mood for anachronisms, she “would kill to do an Elizabethan drama where everyone has wooden teeth”.
