A wedding dress, a leak, and a storm over Wuthering Heights
One set photo was all it took. A white bridal gown, a long veil, a misty field. When images of Margot Robbie filming Emerald Fennell's new take on Wuthering Heights surfaced on March 21, 2025, they ricocheted across X/Twitter and Instagram within hours. The pictures, shared widely by film accounts including Film Crave, show Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in an off-shoulder, half-puff-sleeve dress with a full princess skirt and a trailing veil as she clutches a rose bouquet on the moors.
The reaction was immediate and intense. Some Brontë readers bristled at the dress, calling it wrong for the story's late‑18th‑century setting. Others questioned Robbie as Catherine at all, arguing the role demands a rawer, more feral edge than a global movie star might bring. And yet, on the production side, little has changed: filming, which began in January 2025, is moving ahead. Robbie's company LuckyChap is producing, reuniting with Fennell after Promising Young Woman and Saltburn. The film is aiming for a February 2026 release.
Here's the basic setup. Robbie plays Catherine Earnshaw, the mercurial heart of Emily Brontë's novel, opposite Saltburn breakout Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, the outsider raised in the Earnshaw household whose bond with Catherine curdles into obsession. The story ranges over decades on the Yorkshire moors, with Catherine eventually marrying the refined Edgar Linton and detonating everyone around her in the process. The text itself offers little detail about her wedding day, leaving costumers and directors to interpret that moment rather than reproduce it.
So why did a single gown cause such a fuss? Partly because fans care about authenticity, and partly because white wedding dresses carry baggage. Costume historians have explained this repeatedly: white wedding gowns only became the dominant fashion after Queen Victoria's 1840 wedding. Earlier, including the 1770s period that frames Catherine's youth, brides typically wore their best dress in colors that could be reworn. Veils existed but weren't the universal norm outside specific traditions. From that perspective, Robbie's shimmering white dress reads as modern fantasy rather than period fact.
There is a counterpoint. Filmmakers bend history all the time in service of emotion, pacing, or theme. The novel was published in 1847 and has been adapted again and again, each time with a different visual language. William Wyler's 1939 version romanticized the material. The 1992 film with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche leaned Gothic and grand. Andrea Arnold's 2011 adaptation stripped it raw and muddy, casting a Black actor as young Heathcliff to foreground his outsider status. None were museum pieces. Costumes in period dramas often use silhouette, palette, or texture to cue audience feelings, even if the exact stitch is not from the right year.
That tension — between strict fidelity and expressive license — is exactly where Fennell tends to work. Promising Young Woman twisted genre rules to subvert expectations. Saltburn reveled in aesthetics while pushing its characters to uncomfortable extremes. It's not hard to imagine Fennell using a deliberately iconic white dress to say something about Catherine: purity projected, possession sealed, a character entering a gilded cage. Without context, a set photo can flatten all of that into a single screenshot to love or hate.
There is also the casting fight, which feels familiar. Robbie is one of the most bankable stars in the world after Barbie and I, Tonya. Catherine Earnshaw, by contrast, is feral, capricious, even cruel — a woman who can barely stand the limits of the world she was born into. Can a polished A‑lister sell that? It's a fair question, but it's also one that Hollywood has answered in different ways for decades. Think of actors like Nicole Kidman or Charlize Theron taking sharp left turns that reset how audiences saw them. Robbie has dipped into that range before, and Catherine gives her a character with edges, not just romance.
Then there is Elordi as Heathcliff. Fresh off Saltburn and known to TV audiences from Euphoria, he brings a mix of physicality and vulnerability that, on paper, fits the role. Heathcliff has to be magnetic enough to hold Catherine and frightening enough to unsettle everyone else. Whether Fennell is leaning into the pair's star power or trying to strip it down will be one of the most watched choices as trailers roll out next year.
The dress debate is really a proxy for a bigger conversation about adaptation. How close should filmmakers stick to the page when the page is sparse on specifics? Brontë did not give us a catalog entry for Catherine's wedding look. She gave us the emotional blast radius of that marriage. That leaves modern teams weighing two tracks: the timeline of the story's world and the expectations of today's audiences, who read costumes like they read dialogue. A white gown signals wedding instantly; an 18th‑century best dress might not read at a glance in a trailer thumbnail.
Social media also warps the process. Movies used to control first looks. Now, with location shoots and camera phones, an unfinished moment can define the narrative months before a studio reveals a single frame of color-graded footage. Wardrobe can be a stand-in, an early strawman for anxieties about tone and fidelity. It happened with Little Women (the 2019 film embraced modern energy inside period clothes), Persuasion (the Netflix version got pilloried for its playful dialogue), and Bridgerton (which openly mixes eras to create a glossy alternate history). Wuthering Heights arrives into that same arena.
Beyond gowns and outrage, the production is intriguing for other reasons. LuckyChap has a track record of backing projects with a sharp point of view, from the grit of I, Tonya to the candy-colored cynicism of Barbie and the provocation of Saltburn. Fennell writes and directs with a taste for discomfort, which fits a novel where love curdles into cruelty and grief. If anything, this material risks being softened by nostalgia. Expect Fennell to resist that.
Practical details matter too. The story spans multiple homes — Wuthering Heights itself and the Lintons' Thrushcross Grange — and demands weather, mud, and wind. The leaked photos suggest the team is leaning into the moors as more than a backdrop. That choice tends to be a dividing line among adaptations: the land as character versus the land as scenery. If the moors feel alive, Catherine and Heathcliff's intensity can feel earned rather than melodramatic.
What should viewers watch for next? First, whether official stills show more historically grounded looks alongside the wedding costume. Productions often mix scenes across decades, and a single gown can be a deliberate statement rather than the baseline. Second, how the script frames Catherine and Edgar's marriage. In the book, that union is pivotal and fraught, but Brontë leaves much of the pageantry to the imagination. Fennell may push it to the foreground to explain Catherine's choices and the social pressures around her. And third, how Heathcliff's background is portrayed. Casting, accent, and framing all influence how audiences read class and outsider status — core to the story's bite.
Finally, the timeline. With filming underway and a February 2026 release penciled in, there's a long runway for marketing to shift the conversation. The first teaser will do more to settle the debate than any leaked photo. Until then, the wedding dress will stand as a Rorschach test: either a deal-breaker for purists or a hint that Fennell is staking out her own ground, one bold choice at a time.
Costumes, accuracy, and the line between history and storytelling
If you're keeping score at home, here's the quick context many fans are citing. The novel was published in 1847, but much of Catherine and Heathcliff's youth sits in the late 18th century. White wedding dominance is a Victorian fashion trend after 1840, not a Georgian norm. Rural Yorkshire would likely have seen practical gowns in dyed linens, silks, or wools, worn again after the ceremony. Veils varied by region and class. From that standpoint, the leaked gown looks like a 21st‑century wedding fantasy mapped onto an older world.
Still, filmmakers rarely swear fidelity to every stitch. They chase silhouette and shorthand. A wider skirt can telegraph status. An off-shoulder cut pulls the eye to the neck and collarbone — vulnerability, exposure, a sense of being on display. A long veil reads as ritual and possession. Even the bouquet matters: roses suggest romance and thorns, a neat bit of symbolism on the moors. Whether those choices land as smart storytelling or empty gloss will depend on the scenes around them.
That is the larger bet of this adaptation: give audiences something that feels classic and combustible at once. The complaints will keep coming, as they always do with beloved books. But the thing that will decide this is not a dress. It is whether Catherine and Heathcliff feel like live wires again — two people who would rather set the house on fire than live neatly inside it.