Margot Robbie leads the military jacket revival in London

Margot Robbie just gave the early-aughts reset a new uniform. At the West End opening of 1536 at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on May 12, 2026, she stepped out in a cropped, gold-frogged military jacket from McQueen’s Spring 2026 collection, worn with ultra-low-rise black trousers that leaned straight into the bumster comeback.

The switch was the point. Robbie had only just been in a Chanel gown at the 2026 Met Gala, all soft drama and red-carpet polish; in London, the mood hardened. McQueen under Seán McGirr pushed the brand back toward the kind of sharp, body-skimming silhouette that made Alexander McQueen’s name notorious in the first place, and Robbie wore it like she knew exactly what the jacket was saying. This was not nostalgia in costume form. It was the 2000s stripped of sparkle and rebuilt in hardware, structure, and attitude.

That’s why the look lands now. The military jacket revival has been creeping through Spring/Summer 2026 collections at McQueen, Dior, and Ann Demeulemeester, and Robbie’s version made the trend feel less like a runway exercise and more like something a real woman can actually wear out of the house. The gold frogging gave the jacket enough detail to read as fashion, not surplus-store cosplay, while the low-rise trousers kept the silhouette lean and current. It had the old Y2K provocation, but with cleaner tailoring and a more controlled line through the leg.

McGirr’s Spring 2026 McQueen show already signaled this direction, bringing back the infamous bumster with a charge of erotic tension. On Robbie, that same instinct felt sharpened for 2026: less club kid fantasy, more power dressing with a sly streak. The jacket sat close to the body, the trousers dropped low at the waist, and the whole look read as deliberate, not messy. That’s the difference between a revival and a replay.

The outfit also gave 1536 a fitting fashion backdrop. The play, written by Ava Pickett and directed by Lyndsey Turner, had already sold out at the Almeida Theatre before transferring to the West End for a strictly limited run from May 2 to August 1, 2026. Produced by LuckyChap, Sonia Friedman Productions, Annapurna Theatre and the Almeida Theatre, it brought Robbie into the opening night as both star power and producing force. But the clothes did most of the talking: London just got a clear signal that the 2000s comeback is moving out of glossy nostalgia and into tougher, more wearable territory.