It was fun at first. Margot Robbie in a Schiaparelli recreation of “Solo in the Spotlight” Barbie. Halle Bailey in an iridescent, Ariel-inspired dress for The Little Mermaid premiere. Jenna Ortega elevating Wednesday Addams’s signature look on The Tonight Show. But now, we’re calling it: method dressing is officially tired.
For the (blissfully) unaware, method dressing is when an actor pays homage to the film they’re promoting through clothing. This isn’t a new phenomenon: at the 1992 premiere of A League of Their Own, Geena Davis wore a dress with baseball stitching. In 2019, at the Maleficent: Mistress of Evil premiere, Elle Fanning and Angelina Jolie donned red carpet looks that embodied their characters. And in 2021, Zendaya nodded to Spider-Man: No Way Home with a custom Valentino cobweb dress.
Method dressing officially hit the stratosphere with the Barbie press tour, when Margot Robbie and her stylist, Andrew Mukamal, turned the actor into a life-sized replica of the titular doll. For the better part of a year, she wore almost exclusively pink, blurring the lines between Margot Robbie the actor and Barbie the character—one pink skirt suit at a time. But while method dressing felt inventive with Robbie and Mukamal, it seems that it’s become a normal part of film promotion—and it’s grown stale.
Even the seemingly infallible Zendaya and Law Roach took a rare sartorial stumble with method dressing. While the actor smashed her Dune: Part Two press tour looks—complete with the Theirry Mugler gynoid suit and the 1999 Givenchy by Alexander McQueen—they seemed to struggle a bit more when the theme wasn’t as nebulous as the Dune universe. Immediately following the sci-fi release, the team pivoted into Challengers mode, trying to get butts in seats with an endless array of tennis ball hues and riffs on sportswear. While there were definite jaw-droppers, like her sparkling green Loewe dress featuring a player’s shadow, or the tennis ball pumps, the look quickly grew repetitive. How many neon green dresses and pleated skirts does a woman really need to wear to get the point across?
Zendaya’s back-to-back press tours pointed out another problem with method dressing: only the women are giving it their all. (See: the photo of her in her gynoid suit next to co-star Timothée Chalamet, wearing an oversized black T-shirt.) While method dressing promises escapism and fantasy, nothing shatters the illusion quite like seeing a woman who spent hours preparing to wear a custom, on-theme look standing next to men in regular clothes. The promotion for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga has offered a similarly stark dichotomy: Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth were recently pulled through Hollywood by a chariot, her in a black leather warrior-esque dress; him in a silk button-up and jeans.
As if celebrity culture wasn’t parasocial enough already, method dressing is bleeding into real life, creating even more conflation between actors and their characters. Jenna Ortega was Wednesday Addams. Margot Robbie became Barbie. Wicked won’t even be out until Thanksgiving, but its stars, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, have already been obligated to wear pink and green for months now. The two even presented at the 2024 Oscars dressed in more than a wink to Glinda and Elphaba, with Grande in a poofy pink Giambattista Valli Haute Couture number, and Erivo in a custom green leather Louis Vuitton. Since then, the duo has practiced Wicked dressing everywhere from CinemaCon to the Met Gala.
The film industry took a massive hit during the Covid pandemic, and the Barbie method dressing proved that fashion could spark peoples’ interest in film again. (Not only did people go to the theaters, but they went in costume, sparking a major fashion trend, too.) But the purity of the intention has been sullied by a desire to turn that creativity into cash. By encouraging—or requiring—actors to tap into their characters, studios have managed to suck the joy out of method dressing, and force actors to reembody their characters long after filming wraps. Perhaps we’re all just better off dressing as ourselves.
