Wuthering Heights rolls out global fashion-led marketing campaign

What appears at first glance to be another prestige literary adaptation has emerged as one of the most extensive fashion and lifestyle marketing campaigns attached to a film release, not seen since Barbie. Wuthering Heights has been supported by a global, multi-category rollout that positions the film less as a standalone cultural product and more as a fully integrated brand platform.

Ahead of its theatrical release, the film was linked to more than 50 brand partnerships worldwide, according to culture zine Popbitch, spanning fashion, beauty, food, transport and consumer goods. Rather than focusing on a single high-profile fashion collaborator, like Jonathan Anderson’s costume for tennis drama The Challengers in 2024, the strategy favoured scale and reach with a network of licensed activations ranging from department store collections to everyday consumables such as nail polish, hair tools and tissues. The scope of the programme reflects a growing reliance on ancillary partnerships to drive both revenue and visibility in a competitive box office environment.

The film, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, may also be helping to shape SS26 fashion, according to Clearpay’s latest sales data. The film’s gothic, windswept aesthetic aligns closely with a growing appetite for romantic, dramatic dressing, with sunshine yellow dress sales up 96 percent and sheer polkadot dresses up 300 percent.

Fashion’s main character role

In the US, Bloomingdale’s introduced a Wuthering Heights-themed capsule designed to translate the film’s gothic romanticism into commercial apparel. Dark palettes, textured fabrics and dramatic silhouettes were positioned as mood-driven fashion rather than costume, aligning the collection with current consumer interest in “cinematic” dressing while remaining accessible at department store level.

Physical retail and public spaces were also incorporated into the media strategy. At Century City Mall in Los Angeles, a branded installation featuring tear-off messages linked directly to ticket sales via QR codes merged experiential marketing with performance-driven retail. Similar activations appeared internationally, adapted to local markets: a women’s-only branded metro carriage in Brazil, themed horse-and-cart journeys in Canada, and a Love Lock Wall installation in the UK designed to encourage social sharing.

Red carpet appearances further amplified the campaign’s fashion impact. The film’s leading actors used premieres and press tours as coordinated fashion moments, with custom looks and archive-inspired styling generating front-page coverage across fashion media. As with recent blockbuster releases, red carpet dressing functioned less as celebrity styling and more as a controlled marketing channel, extending the film’s aesthetic into editorial, digital and social platforms.

Social media as a key distribution mechanism

Warner Bros. reportedly partnered with close to 2,000 influencers globally, prioritising volume and frequency over traditional critique. Content focused on emotional response, styling and atmosphere rather than formal reviews, reflecting a broader shift in how cultural products are legitimised and promoted within fashion-adjacent audiences.

The scale of the campaign has drawn inevitable comparisons with Barbie, which set a recent benchmark for entertainment-driven brand collaborations. While Barbie*pursued a tightly unified visual identity, most notably through its all-encompassing use of pink across fashion, beauty and retail, Wuthering Heights adopted a more decentralised approach. Instead of a single dominant aesthetic, it relied on mood, narrative and emotional cues that could be interpreted across categories and markets.

Film studios are increasingly operating like global brands, while fashion and lifestyle companies are positioning entertainment partnerships as core marketing channels rather than peripheral collaborations. As cinema continues to compete for attention, fashion has become both a distribution platform and a credibility engine. Perhaps this is the new omni channel in entertainment, where red carpets, retail floors, influencer feeds and public transport all function as interconnected touchpoints to maximise commercial impact.