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.