Margot Robbie started walking Australian award show carpets at 19, in dresses that got her onto worst-dressed lists, and she now gets Chanel gowns built for her over hundreds of hours. The distance between those two facts covers roughly 17 years, a couple of stylists’ worth of decisions and a “Barbie” press tour that rewrote what a film promotion could look like. Here is that shift, one appearance at a time.
The 2009 Logies Look That Split Australian Critics
Long before couture houses were building gowns around her, Margot Robbie turned up at the 51st TV Week Logie Awards at Melbourne’s Crown Towers Hotel and Casino as a 19-year-old soap actor with a plus one, her then boyfriend and “Neighbours” costar Dean Guyer. Her dress was an orange and black corset design with a frilly high-low skirt by Australian designer Rebecca Copping, styled with black heels and her hair up.
It read as fun and a little theatrical for a first big carpet, and plenty of local fashion writers were not convinced. The look landed on a number of worst-dressed lists that year, which is a strange thing to read now that she is a fixture at Chanel and Schiaparelli. It also shows she was never especially interested in playing it safe.