Everything is Material To Law Roach
this was supposed to be The Odyssey's press tour
Happy Friday everyone! Okay, so I finally got Odyssey tickets, which felt like its own odyssey. I probably should have gotten them when ticket sales opened up months ago, but I am a typical Gemini procrastinator. Anyways, I’ve spent the last few days watching the press tour because Zendaya press tours are like Christmas to me. However, this tour felt different from recent outings for The Drama & Dune Pt. 2 in the sense that it seemed like at moments her longtime stylist Law Roach and the backlash to his styling process and choices overshadowed Zendaya on the red carpet. At least that’s what it felt like watching via Twitter where discourse is the lifeblood. Of course I have many thoughts about Law Roach (who I love as a fashion industry professional ), and this discourse that keeps attaching itself to him on this tour.
Explainer guide for those new here: Roach didn’t come up through the traditional stylist pipeline with years spent assisting someone bigger, etc. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago, started as a vintage dealer, opened a shop called Deliciously Vintage Harlem, and built his client list from the ground up at the same time Zendaya was still a Disney kid. Everything after that, the CFDA Stylist Award in 2022 (the first one ever given), the role as a judge on HBO’s ballroom reality show, Legendary, the Project Runway seat, the retirement in 2023 where he said flatly that the “politics, the lies, the false narratives” finally got him, and the return last year, all happened while he and Zendaya were building each other in real time through their creative partnership. He was also early to a lot of designers who were just starting out, like Christopher Esber, Mônot, Peter Do, and Jason Rembert’s Aliette which is an attestment to his visionary eye.
Now onto The Odyssey press tour. I’ll start with the jet, since that’s actually what kicked this all off. The day of the London premiere, Roach told fashion commentator Lyas that he flew in specifically for the Schiaparelli’s Fall 2026 couture show and had a private jet ready to take him and the finale dress to London for Zendaya to wear that same night.
Now I’ll say what I actually think, which is that this particular little anecdote was in extremely bad taste. I cringed watching the clip. It’s not that I think stylists shouldn’t have resources or move fast, but because THAT particular gesture had no purpose beyond celebrating its own excess. It wasn’t solving a problem so much as broadcasting one, loudly, specifically engineered to generate viral headlines. Irritating yes, but for someone who has been this explicit for this long about where he’s trying to end up, the fashion house he says he wants to own (Ungaro), the billionaire social circles, the general project of becoming inarguable in his brain, the jet story isn’t a scandal to him at all. It’s more material for the never-ending Law Show. I think he’s fully aware this is the kind of story that gets repeated till the end of time, the stylist who moved a plane for a dress, and that self-aggrandizing mythology has always been part of his plan right alongside the client list.
Next, the earrings. Zendaya wore gold plaque earrings to the London Odyssey photocall, pieces believed to date to the first millennium BCE, sourced through the antiquities dealer Barron London and remounted in diamonds by Glenn Spiro. Of course, per the Law Roach handbook, this was just another chapter in the method dressing he’s become known for: when she’s playing a goddess from a myth that old, you give her something actually that old. It’s coherent styling logic that says nothing about the origin of the pieces.
Archaeologists, however, were more than ready to push back. They traced the pieces to the notorious Ziwiye hoard, a trove of gold, silver, ivory, and bronze artifacts plundered from a citadel hill near the village of Ziwiye (in modern Kurdistan Province, northwestern Iran) around 1947. The discovery was never a proper archaeological excavation: local villagers (accounts vary between shepherds, laborers, and peasants) stumbled upon the material, cut up many of the repoussé gold objects to divide them, and funneled the rest into the antiquities market through dealers. No controlled digs ever recovered comparable treasures there, and scholars like Oscar White Muscarella have long argued that the “Ziwiye” label became a convenient catch-all for hundreds of unprovenanced objects , some likely authentic, others from nearby sites or outright forgeries, with no clean chain of custody ever established.
The optics only got worse once people clocked the timing: Iranian artifacts, fresh off a global press tour, paraded during a period when the United States was actively bombing Iran. This is one where I think the criticism is also a bit valid. Because….Law……let’s research mama. Now do I think he had ill intentions? Not in the least. Do I think Law is a busy professional mostly occupied with the surface value of what he’s doing? Well... yes.
And then there’s another significant dress itself, separate from the jet anecdote. The Matières Fécales gown from the New York premiere, with its angel wings and raw feathered train.
Roach told the press he’d seen that exact look walk the runway two or three years ago, before The Odyssey was even filmed, and asked the house to hold it. And they did.
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They turned down other placements on that dress for two years, according to Roach and confirmed by the brand itself, because they’d made the promise. Now some people are reading that as a beautiful almost obsessive piece of planning, proof that Roach thinks in decades while everyone else thinks in seasons. But other people are reading it as something akin to a small house getting strong-armed into sitting on its own best asset for two years so one stylist could control the timing of his own narrative. Most emerging brands don’t have unlimited runway looks to spare. Every season is inventory, is press, and tying up your most striking piece for two years on the promise of one future red carpet moment is a real bet and one that only pays off if the person asking you to make it is exactly as powerful as Roach turned out to be. It worked because it always works for him. But “it worked” and “it wasn’t a slightly extractive ask” aren’t mutually exclusive, and I think that’s throwing further fuel on the fire that is the backlash to Law this press tour.
One thing about Law which I think actually explains a lot in reference to the other two stories is that he genuinely, unapologetically loves this life. The diamonds, the Birkins, the paparazzi, the whole apparatus of being visibly, undeniably a somebody. He’s not performing humility or pretending to be reluctant about his fame the way some people in his position do, with the “oh I just love the clothes” posturing. He wants the attention! He wants to be a star! He built toward it on purpose. It’s what keeps him highly paid and in high demand. We are in an attention economy after all.
Which is probably why the Lauren Sanchez styling gig which saw him dressing her in archival Versace for Paris Fashion Week and getting dragged online (and written about by me) , for lending his eye to someone widely mocked as “allergic to serving,” for supposedly cheapening his brand by association with Bezos money (with all its connotations, Amazon’s ICE contracts, Trump associations, and the broader optics), probably didn’t even register as a real event to him. That backlash lives entirely inside a value system he’s not operating in. People were furious that he’d cheapened his carefully cultivated taste by associating with a woman who’d shown up to the Trump inauguration in a lacy bra, but Roach has spent years constructing a life specifically insulated from having to care about that kind of judgment. He’s already got the billionaire circles, the star clients, the CFDA trophy, the television deals. Styling Sanchez isn’t a compromise from inside that world, it’s just another workday.
So you’ve got all these different flavors of controversy piled onto one press tour, yet they keep getting flattened into one big referendum on Roach’s character. Really, only one of them is an actual ethics story. The rest are about power, excess, taste which are very real critiques, but not the same critique. Roach benefits from the confusion, because it’s easier for people to write him off wholesale than to admit he might be guilty of one thing and basically innocent of the others.
Where I feel the real conflict is this other layer. I’ve heard how some people in Paris talk about him, always that “he’s doing too much” diatribe, like he’s got too much personality for a job that’s supposed to keep him in the background. Lauren Sherman hit on that in her 2023 Puck piece, which I thought was pretty ugly, basically painting him as the help who got too big for his britches. At the end of the day, a lot of the pushback comes down to that sentiment.
Now that’s not to say I think he’s above critique. I do think he deserves criticism, especially on the ethics side. But at the core of it, Roach runs on one fixed point annd everything either serves that point or it’s noise. That’s his whole operating system because he has big goals that need big money, and big money is rarely clean. That’s why the dress hold, and the jet for a dress, and the provenance stuff don’t really register as problems for him. He’s never going to care about being liked the way people expect him to, because he’s managed to make himself matter to the people he aspires to be.
"...big money is rarely clean". Facts lol
This is such a clear take on the image that is Law Roach