Yahoo Lifestyle How Law Roach changed the way we see celebrity
No one has ever been as famous for helping other people put on clothes as Law Roach.
He dressed Celine Dion, cheekily, in a “Titanic” Vetements sweatshirt. Hunter Schafer, impossibly, in a single feather as a top. Anya Taylor-Joy, joyfully, in hot-pink Dior couture with a matching pillbox hat.
“Law has transcended styling the way that a lot of stylists have not,” said Recho Omondi, fashion observer and host of the fashion podcast “The Cutting Room Floor,” who interviewed Roach this year. “He’s more famous than any other stylist we could be talking about.”
Roach is not as famous as Zendaya, who was Roach’s first client and whose fame is symbiotic with his own, or Dion or Schafer, but he has invented a new category of famous person, a category of which he arguably remains the only member: the celebrity celebrity stylist. Roach is a lodestar of firsts: the first major Black celebrity stylist, the first celebrity stylist to regularly style his client’s magazine covers as well as their red-carpet appearances, the first stylist to sit front row at fashion shows, right alongside the (other) celebrities. (Most stylists are booted to the second or third row, either by choice or publicist decree.) He made wearing vintage clothes cooler than wearing new ones. Roach is not unaware of his importance. He even invented a new name for himself: He is not a stylist but an “image architect.”
“To me, an Image Architect is someone who delivers a moment,” Roach writes in his forthcoming book, “How to Build a Fashion Icon: Notes on Confidence from the World’s Only Image Architect,” out this coming Tuesday. “The boldness and drama of a look complemented by a woman (or anyone, to be honest) who knows their worth.”
He was also the first stylist to … retire. In March 2023, the 46-year-old posted “RETIRED” on Instagram with a message about his decision to step away from much of his styling work. “If this business was just about the clothes I would do it for the rest of my life but unfortunately it’s not,” he wrote. “The politics, the lies and false narratives finally got me!” It made international news for its combination of rawness and shade. (Roach still works with Zendaya and other select clients and seems, even for a non-retired person, extraordinarily busy.) Interview Magazine photographed him in a red wig and heels to celebrate. “Everyone in fashion was talking about Law obsessively at the time because of the retirement,” said the magazine’s editor, Mel Ottenberg (who first gained renown for styling Rihanna). “I knew he would dish with me, and I knew we would get good photos.”
Roach is making news again with his book, but it is not a celebrity memoir. “Oh no, no, no, I’m not ready for that,” said Roach, speaking by phone last month. “I thought that I had something else that people could actually take away and use. And I think that confidence is one of the, if not the, biggest factor in how I was able to become as successful as I became.”
The book offers mostly platitudinal advice on developing self-esteem, interspersed with anecdotes about dressing Megan Thee Stallion and Zendaya. “It’s called ‘How to Build a Fashion Icon,’” he said. “But it’s not really about that at all. It’s about finding your confidence so that you can become the icon of whatever it is that you’re doing.”
Before Roach, celebrity styling was a behind-the-scenes job with occasional moments of glamour - like a hairstylist or a publicist. The people who do this job - who are mostly White women, such as Kate Young (who styles Michelle Williams), Danielle Goldberg (Ayo Edebiri, Greta Lee) and Jamie Mizrahi (Jennifer Lawrence and Adele) - may look more fabulous than the average woman, but styling is primarily a thankless job. Stylists are creative and visual people, but the role is essentially to secure a clothing’s rack worth of workable dresses for any given event, and increasingly, to ensure that those dresses are by the designer with which their client has a lucrative contract. It is a hustler’s game more than a dreamer’s.
For those who put their pants on one leg at a time like everyone else, a stylist may seem extraneous, even ridiculous. But the stylist has become an essential part of the Hollywood firmament, where brand deals can rival paychecks for major film roles. And the job is not just about money: Clothes have become mini-trailers for films, in large part thanks to the approach of stylists like Roach. The online chatter generated by Zendaya’s themed ensembles for her “Challengers” and “Dune” press tours this year nearly trumped that of either film. The same goes for “Barbie,” where Margot Robbie (who works with Andrew Mukamal) dressed her way into everybody’s head. It’s become trendy to say that fashion has become a part of popular culture, but the reality is that most people aren’t looking at an Armani or Louis Vuitton dress on the runway. They’re learning about it through Zendaya.
- - -
Roach did not have the early life typical of a fashion icon or even a stylist, many of whom got their start assisting high-powered magazine editors. Raised in Chicago, he was bullied for his feminine personality and last name, but “I was able to navigate all that without horror stories and any real wounds,” he said. He played with Barbies as a young boy. “Barbie was my first client,” he said. “I wanted to be around beautiful women and put them in beautiful clothes. That’s always been euphoric for me.”
His mother died when he was 24, and he became responsible for his four siblings. “A lot of my friends’ mothers were kind of the same, so you didn’t really know that it was different until you found out that your life was different. Early on, my mother told me if I didn’t work, I didn’t eat,” he said. “But if I had the opportunity to go back and change the way that I was raised, I probably wouldn’t. I think it made me so much who I am.”
He bartended, then opened a vintage business. In 2009, Kanye West stopped in, which helped put him on the map. Through a family friend, he met Zendaya, a then-13-year-old actress and singer who needed help with her image for publicity appearances.
It is hard to overstate the impact of Roach’s work with Zendaya. In the decade before they started working together, celebrities mostly dressed to look the same: thin and mildly stylish, but not too fashionable lest they risk ending up on a worst-dressed list. When the stylist became a Hollywood power player, about a decade ago, the idea was to wear something that was fresh off the runway, months before it was in stores. But Roach often put Zendaya in vintage clothes from his store. “It first came through necessity, because I had the store when I first started working with Zendaya, and nobody would lend us clothes,” he said. “I think when you put on something that already has a story and use that story to tell a bigger story, or introduce your story, I think it’s really beautiful.”
Rather than flex his access to fashion’s inner circle of influence, Roach said the most interesting thing a dress could do was explain a person’s life - their obsessions, their work, even their insecurities. (In the book, he describes an emotional conversation with Megan Thee Stallion about wearing her natural hair to Vanity Fair’s Oscars after-party.) This narrative style of dressing, of telling a story or playing with a theme, has changed the way the public sees fashion. “He helped deepen the public’s relationship with vintage,” said Blythe Marks, a Los Angeles-based vintage dealer. “There were certainly celebrity stylists who were personalities unto themselves. But he really put the focus back on how important the piece was, its connection to the celebrity, its connection to [the designer’s] archive, and made that history part of the look rather than simply focusing on the image.”
Roach does not seem interested in what fashion insiders deem cool. A stylist such as Goldberg, for example, dresses her clients in the brands editors and influencers fawn over, such as The Row and Bottega Veneta. Roach is less interested in showing that he is clued into the fashion bubble’s obsessions of the moment than what is epic, even extreme.
This sense of outrageousness has also made Roach famous - an Anna Wintour or Karl Lagerfeld for Gen Z and millennials, someone whose signature look is as recognizable as a cartoon character. (I once saw Roach front row at an outdoor show on a rainy day and noted that his Birkin had its own raincoat.) People recognize him on the street, even if his extraordinarily long black hair, voluminous black tailoring, sunglasses and discerning pout are hidden under sunglasses or a hat. “People think it’s going to be a big production with a bunch of security and things. It’s not. I came from a very humble place, and that person, that little boy, is still in me.”
At times, it has earned him a reputation as a diva, and he said he’s sometimes considered intimidating, to his surprise. “I think I came in and created that persona on purpose,” he said. “I wanted to, almost to, have this thing to keep people from penetrating me. You know, getting too close. I came into the industry, and the industry didn’t look the way it looks now. I didn’t come from anyone’s lineage or legacy. I was never anyone’s assistant. I created this persona where I worked to make myself feel very untouchable and intangible - almost like, ‘Don’t f --- with me.’ People would try to make me feel invisible and unseen and unheard, and I had to fight a lot. I think that’s where that super-tough exterior came from. And I think me retiring was the first time I got to just let all that go.”
When he announced his retirement, Roach lost his sense of self. “If I wasn’t a stylist, I didn’t know who I was, you know? I had no sense of self outside of the people I dressed. Which became incredibly depressing.”
- - -
Roach’s book comes at a moment when he feels at peace. He tried using a ghostwriter at first, but after a couple of weeks, “they just couldn’t find my voice,” he said. “And it felt really inauthentic to me. I ended up just doing it myself.”
Authenticity is a word that Roach uses almost obsessively. He believes it, plus his confidence, are the reasons he has found success. He said he sometimes found himself in a room with someone such as Dion, quietly bowled over that he, of all people, was telling this incredibly talented and famous woman what to wear. “They always say animals smell fear. And I think celebrities do, too.” He cackled. “They smell fear, and they also smell when someone’s not being authentic, and they also feel when somebody’s not confident. You have to be confident enough to tell them that the choice you guys are making together is the right choice. That’s a real power, and it’s a real talent.”
It isn’t just that cocksureness that has made Roach a success. He has a sense for the dramatic flourish - the dress or ensemble as a narrative arc. He will think of a look from the fashion canon - Thierry Mugler’s robot suit from 1995, or a vintage John Galliano gown from his 1996 debut couture show for Givenchy - that somehow plays up Zendaya’s film, persona or reputation. (In the case of the robot look, it was the press tour for the science fiction epic “Dune”; for the latter, it was her second look for the 2023 Met Gala.) The difficulty of getting such a garment is unimaginable to someone outside of fashion. Designers often have imperfect archives; showstopping dresses are sometimes given away or simply lost after runway shows. If a house does have a look, its team will want to ensure that the celebrity is a good fit, and then there’s the question of whether the piece itself will, well, literally fit.
Roach’s access to some of these pieces is “just astonishing,” Marks said. Like a curator or art collector who brandishes rare artworks before crowds, he has made not just the beauty of the dress, but the rarity and the story behind it, into part of the red-carpet conversation.
He has also changed the rules for the highly regimented partnerships between brands and the celebrities they dress. In 2023, Zendaya became a global ambassador for Louis Vuitton - a role that means attending fashion shows, wearing the brand’s designs for publicity events and appearing in ad campaigns. These kinds of deals sometimes pay more than what a star might make acting in a film, but they are also tightly scripted. Roach, however, mixes vintage and other brands in with Nicolas Ghesquiere’s designs. How? “I mean, we see that’s what she does,” he said. “Fashion and what [Zendaya and I] have created in fashion together is more important than any amount of money, because it has brought us so much peace and joy.”
Besides, “the clothes we choose and the way we wear them have such a strong identity,” Roach said. “It’s the meeting of both brands that makes it special. It makes it different from everything else and everybody else.”
Does Zendaya make money when she wears designers other than Louis Vuitton? “She doesn’t get paid to wear any brands other than the contracts that she’s in,” he said. Does he? “There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about pay to play. I think stylists should be paid from brands for special moments. People think that a working stylist makes tons of money. And that’s not true. If you’re dressing someone for a huge event, the amount of work that goes into getting the dress, finding the dress, securing the dress. Fitting the dress. Fitting the dress again. Brands should pay, should find ways to appreciate the talent because we are the ultimate connectors.
“They should show appreciation, and I hope that happens more frequently and more often.”
As Roach sees it, “we’re giving them millions and millions and millions of advertising. Millions of dollars. Somebody could be dressing someone for something during awards season, and they could be making $700 for that look, $750 for that look. Just for one night.” Between all the alterations and shipping costs, “people are barely making it. There’s only a few stylists that are really making a lot of money, but they have multiple clients. I’m thinking about people who, at a certain event, are dressing 10, 11, 12 people.”
How much should they get paid? “Thousands. Thousands and thousands and thousands,” he said. “Because listen: We are helping to sell a product, right? Why should everybody else benefit off that but us?” Actors are on the carpet to promote a project, “and they’re going to make a certain amount of money. And I think that we are doing just as much to sell that product. We get the eyes on it, you know?”
Do celebrities get paid thousands and thousands to wear things? “I don’t know how much celebrities get paid to wear things. I don’t know,” Roach said. Really? “I don’t know.”
We move onto less ethically tricky waters. Just kidding: I asked what he would dress Kamala Harris in. “I would love to dress our future president,” he said. “She’s very stylish.” He thinks she’s playing the fashion game well. “I can’t wait for Kamala, after she’s elected and serves the country the way I know she will, she gets it, kind of: turn it on and pump it up a little bit. I want to be there for that moment.”
Related Content
Meet the United Auto Workers members who could swing the election
When ‘bear jams’ close the road, this park brigade comes to the rescue
She took a solo honeymoon after her fiancé died — and found a community
