Law Roach Is Turning Zendaya’s Red Carpet Into a Living Archive

Written by: Lucy Dover (@lucy_dover_)

From a Schiaparelli gown rushed from the runway to an overlooked Willi Smith design revived almost four decades later, Zendaya’s latest press tours prove that Law Roach is doing far more than choosing beautiful clothes.

On the morning of The Odyssey’s London premiere, Zendaya’s dress was still on a runway in Paris.

The Schiaparelli gown, designed by Daniel Roseberry for the house’s Autumn 2026 couture collection, featured a moulded bustier, a fringed skirt and lights woven between its silver and gold embellishments. Law Roach had travelled to Paris the night before, watched the dress appear on the runway and then carried it to London in time for Zendaya to wear it that evening.

The turnaround was so fast that images of the gown on the model and Zendaya’s red-carpet photographs appeared online within hours of one another. 

It would be easy to read the moment solely as proof of access. Few stylists could convince a major fashion house to release a couture finale immediately after its debut, let alone arrange for it to cross countries within hours. Yet access only explains how the dress reached Zendaya. It does not explain why it made so many headlines.

On Zendaya, the sculpted bodice and illuminated skirt resembled armour pulled from another world. It continued the visual language Roach had developed around her role as Athena without reducing Greek mythology to sandals, white draping and a gold laurel crown. The dress was new, but the story it helped tell was thousands of years old.

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That ability to bring different timelines together has become one of Roach’s signatures. Across Zendaya’s recent press tours for The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, he has moved between dresses unveiled that morning and pieces created almost 40 years ago. The clothes may come from different designers, decades and archives, but under Roach’s direction they become chapters in the same story.

At this point, arguing that Law Roach is one of the best stylists working today almost feels redundant. What matters more is understanding what he does with that position. As a Black queer creative operating at the highest level of an industry that has not always welcomed people who look like him or Zendaya, Roach has turned visibility into a resource. He does not simply make fashion history. Increasingly, he decides which parts of fashion history are remembered.

The long game

If the Schiaparelli dress represented speed, the winged Matières Fécales gown Zendaya wore to The Odyssey’s New York premiere represented the opposite.

Roach first spotted the white gown as the finale of Matières Fécales’ debut runway collection. At the time, the Paris-based label was still emerging, and the promotional campaign for The Odyssey was far enough away that Roach could not tell designers Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran exactly why he wanted it.

He contacted them through Instagram and asked them to hold the dress for Zendaya. They agreed. For almost two years, the designers kept the gown aside, reportedly turning down other requests because they trusted that Roach had imagined the right moment for it.

When Zendaya finally wore it, the reasoning became obvious. Its enormous feathered wings extended from behind a strapless white bodice, making her resemble a statue of Nike pulled from a museum and brought to life. 

That foresight is a central part of his work. Celebrity styling often appears reactive, as though a stylist waits for a premiere, looks through the collections currently available and finds the most attractive option. Roach’s process is closer to world-building. He stores garments, references and silhouettes in what he has called his mental “Rolodex”, sometimes waiting years for the right project to bring them back into view.

For The Odyssey’s Paris premiere, that meant turning to Alexander McQueen’s first couture collection for Givenchy.

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Presented in 1997, The Search for the Golden Fleece drew from the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts. Roach sourced the white, sharply structured dress originally worn by Debra Shaw, as well as its gold Philip Treacy headpiece. Tracking the two pieces down reportedly took years because the dress and headpiece were held separately.

The pull was clever not simply because it was rare, but because Roach understood the collection. McQueen’s design was not vaguely “Grecian”. It came from a body of work directly concerned with mythology, conquest and the Golden Fleece. By placing it on Zendaya almost three decades later, Roach invited the collection’s original narrative into conversation with the film she was promoting.

Looking beyond the obvious reference

That fluency continued throughout the Spider-Man: Brand New Day press tour.

At a London photocall, Zendaya wore a blue John Galliano gown from the designer’s Spring/Summer 1997 collection. From the front, its bias-cut silhouette appeared relatively restrained. When she turned around, a silver, jewelled spider’s web stretched across the entirely open back.

“Don’t threaten me with a theme,” Roach wrote when sharing the look.

The dress was not designed for a superhero film, nor did it require spiders to be added after the fact. Roach found a nearly 30-year-old garment that already carried the perfect detail.

But the tour’s most meaningful reference did not come from a European couture archive.

In 1987, Marvel commissioned Black American designer Willi Smith to create clothing for Mary Jane Watson as part of The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, which featured the wedding of Mary Jane and Peter Parker. Smith designed a wedding gown and a wider capsule for the character, including a black-and-white striped dress finished with a red flounced hem.

For the 2026 press tour, Roach and Zendaya worked with contemporary Black designer LaQuan Smith to recreate that lesser-known design. Zendaya wore the finished look to the London premiere’s afterparty.

Willi Smith was one of the most commercially successful Black designers of his generation. Through WilliWear, he helped shape what he called “street couture”, creating relaxed and gender-fluid clothing informed by art, nightlife, music and the way people dressed in real life. His business reportedly generated $25 million annually, yet his name is far less widely recognised than those of many of his white contemporaries. Smith died from AIDS-related complications in 1987, the same year his designs appeared in the Spider-Man comic.

Roach could have referenced Mary Jane’s comic-book wedding dress directly. Instead, he selected a less recognisable piece, asked LaQuan Smith to reinterpret it and then supplied the history alongside the final image. The result did not merely celebrate Zendaya’s character. It returned Willi Smith’s name to the fashion conversation and connected his work to another generation of Black queer design.

It is here that Roach’s archive work becomes especially important. Fashion often treats the archive as a marker of exclusivity. The rarest pieces belong to the people with the greatest access, and their value is partly created by how few people are permitted to touch them. Roach uses rarity differently. His best archive pulls do not close the circle. They widen it.

Visibility as a shared resource

Roach and Zendaya’s position in fashion was not handed to them.

When they began working together, Zendaya was a teenager without the status she now holds. Roach has since said that major houses including Saint Laurent, Chanel, Gucci, Valentino and Dior rejected requests to dress her, telling him that she was “too green”. Even after she became one of the world’s most recognisable actors, he remembered those refusals.

It is worth remembering that history when looking at the Schiaparelli gown travelling directly from Paris to London. The same industry that once refused to lend them clothes now rearranges its schedule around them.

Roach has recalled entering boardrooms where people attempted to ignore him or speak around him, only for a teenage Zendaya to redirect the conversation. She would tell executives that Law had something to say, or repeat a question when someone pretended not to hear it. “When someone would try to take the power,” he explained, “she would hand it right back to me.”

He has done the same for her.

Roach helped construct an image of Zendaya that refused the narrow expectations placed on young Black actresses. She could wear locs with a white Vivienne Westwood gown, transform into Joan of Arc in Versace, appear in futuristic Mugler armour or arrive as a mythological goddess in McQueen-era Givenchy. There was no single version of Black femininity she was required to perform.

Together, they also developed a pattern of directing attention towards Black designers and fashion history. For Zendaya’s 2020 InStyle cover shoot, Roach dressed her entirely in Black-owned brands, including a pleated Hanifa dress by Congolese designer Anifa Mvuemba, alongside work by Christopher John Rogers, Aliétte, Romeo Hunte, Thebe Magugu and Victor Glemaud. It was reportedly the first InStyle cover shoot to feature only Black designers.

For an Essence cover later that year, Roach placed Zendaya in knitwear by GiGi Hunter, the influential Black woman designer whose work helped define 1990s fashion but whose name remains unfamiliar to many younger audiences.

These choices do not mean that every Zendaya appearance must carry the burden of representation. Nor should Black creatives be expected to correct an industry’s structural exclusions alone. Roach has previously pushed back against the idea that Black stylists should be solely responsible for ensuring Black designers appear on red carpets.

But when he and Zendaya choose to use their influence, the impact is difficult to ignore. A designer’s name can travel with one photograph to millions of people. An overlooked archive can become the subject of new articles and research. A dress preserved for decades can gain a second cultural life.

That is the difference between having power and understanding it.

Law Roach does not enter the archive simply to extract beauty from it. He understands that archives are shaped by whose work institutions decide to preserve, whose names journalists continue to repeat and whose influence is allowed to disappear into somebody else’s success. On Zendaya, clothes become impossible to ignore. Roach knows this better than anyone. His greatest skill may be deciding where that attention should go next.