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Eric Garcia

Washington Bureau Chief

Zendaya’s stylist Law Roach has opened up about one decision he made when he first began working with her - by making her look like other celebrities.

When the actress started her career on the Disney channel in the shows Shake It Up and KC Undercover, luxury brands didn’t want to work with her, thinking she couldn’t adequately market the clothes to a wider audience.

Roach specifically revealed on the podcast The Cutting Room Floor that Chanel, Saint Laurent, Dior, Gucci and Valentino had all refused to work with her.

He had a rule for whenever a brand turned the two of them down, they would never be able to again. “If it’s a no now, it’s a no forever,” he said.

“I figured out that whoever got the most press got the best dresses, so I was, like, I need to get her more press,” the stylist told The New Yorker.

Part of his method to get the Euphoria star seen more was to particularly get her into US Weekly’s “Who Wore It Best” poll, where two celebrities wearing the same outfit are shown side by side and readers vote on which outfit they liked more.

Roach mentioned intentionally dressing The Greatest Showman actress into outfits he had seen other celebrities wearing. He explained that he wasn’t afraid of her potentially losing the poll, saying, “Because I know she’s going to win a battle.”

Roach first started working with Zendaya when she was 14. He now says he dressed her in the same clothes as other celebrities (Getty Images for The Met Museum/)

This isn’t the first time the stylist has spoken about the lack of brands that wanted to work with Zendaya. In a February interview with Vogue, he mentioned that she largely wore vintage pieces when they first started working together because that was all that was available to them.

“We’ve been [pulling vintage] since Zendaya and I began working together, for 13 years now. At first, it came out of necessity because back when we started, nobody would lend her clothes,” he proclaimed. “And I come from vintage - I had a vintage store in Chicago - so a lot of the things that she wore were things from my store or vintage pieces.”

The stylist also recalled a time in 2014 when a publicist didn’t want to give him a black-and-teal Ungaro dress that Zendaya would wear to the Grammy Awards. “When you’re talking about that price point, it doesn’t really make sense to have a girl translating the brand to a woman that has the means to buy those clothes,” the publicist told The New Yorker.

However, Roach refused to leave without the dress, and after the creative director of Ungaro saw Zendaya in it, she scored her first invite to The Met Gala.

Although Roach announced his retirement from celebrity styling in 2023 he admitted to  Interview Magazine’s Mel Ottenberg that he would not stop working with her.

“How can I just pick up and leave somebody when I’m the only stylist they’ve ever had? She’s literally the one client where I’m like: ‘That is my family,’ he remarked. “And I know what I mean to her because she tells me all the time. So I am trying to figure out how to change my position.”

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