Margot Robbie Reimagines the Noughtie’s Favorite Scarf

There was a moment in the mid-noughties, the period roughly between 2004 and 2007, when it was nearly impossible to find anyone in fashion circles who wasn’t draped in Alexander McQueen’s skull print. The likes of Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were all devoted fans. 20-odd years later, and Margot Robbie is back on the skull print bandwagon, stepping out in a decidedly sheer look that winked to the pattern’s heyday.

At a Vogue event in Australia over the weekend, Robbie traded the Victorian romance of her Wuthering Heights press tour for pure Indie Sleaze. The actor wore a custom McQueen dress designed by its current creative director Seán McGirr. With its plunging neckline and gothic motif, the look nodded to one of Kate Moss’s most infamous Alexander McQueen skull-print turns—just one chapter in the model’s long-running love affair with the macabre status symbol.

For a 2004 McQueen retrospective titled “Black,” Moss wore a nearly-identical sheer skull dress that Robbie just pulled out over the weekend. They both amped up the Indie Sleaze factor, with tousled blonde hair and smudged black eyeliner. The print technically debuted a year prior, during McQueen’s shipwreck-inspired spring 2003 collection, but Moss’s stamp of approval arguably spurred the motif into the mainstream.

From them on, the skull print became a harbinger of the brand, allowing consumers an accessible way to buy into the abstract world of Lee McQueen. The skull scarf was especially popular, with socialites of the era—Moss, Richie, Kardashian, the Olsen twins—tying it around around their necks, onto the handles of their purses, and even going as far as to use it as a belt.

Recently, McGirr has revitalized the print, most notably doing so during the fall 2025 season where he showed sheer blousons doused in skull imagery. Now, with Robbie’s sheer moment on the red carpet, is the skull print poised for a full-fledged comeback?