Facebook X Email Print Save Story On a muggy morning in late July, the stylist Law Roach was at the Guggenheim Museum, ready to make a scene. He was there to shoot an episode of “The Bittarverse,” a satirical Web series created by the Brooklyn-based jewelry designer Alexis Bittar, which playfully skewers the fashion industry’s élite. Roach was standing on the ground floor of the museum’s rotunda, dressed for the camera, not the weather, in a black padded blazer, matching pants so long they would have tripped him had he not been wearing five-inch platform heels, and a fur stole the size of a body bag.
Above him swirled a phrase from Jenny Holzer’s “Light Line” installation: “Your Actions Are Pointless If No One Notices.” Roach would be playing a version of himself. His character had been invited to the Guggenheim by the “Bittarverse” staple Margeaux (Patricia Black), a snobby fashion maven living on the Upper East Side.
“Margeaux’s been watching him come up, and she appreciates his hustle, his ability to fuse street with glamour,” Bittar told Roach and Black. There was also some rivalry: Margeaux was afraid of losing her front-row seat at New York Fashion Week to the ascendant Roach. “They’re both cunty,” Bittar added.
“It’s a little ‘A Star Is Born.’ ” Action. Roach traipsed through the glass doors of the lobby, tossing his stole in Black’s general direction.
“A gift for mother?” she inquired. “A gift from mother,” Roach said, improvising. “Cut,” Bittar called.
“Beautiful!” As the cast and crew spilled out onto Fifth Avenue after the shoot, tourists began filming them with their iPhones. Roach has styled a number of A-listers (Céline Dion, Ariana Grande, Kerry Washington). But his partnership with the actress Zendaya is what has made him a celebrity in his own right.
The two began working together in 2011, when Zendaya was a Disney teen and Roach was an inexperienced stylist who did not know he needed to bring safety pins to fittings. Since then, they have become fashion’s most bankable duo; their collaboration is spoken of as on a par with that of Hubert de Givenchy and Audrey Hepburn, Jean Paul Gaultier and Madonna, Bob Mackie and Cher. (Or as Roach, a Chicago native, has put it, “We’re Jordan and Pippen, baby.
We don’t miss.”) The key difference is that Roach is not a designer. Some see stylists as glorified personal shoppers.
The fashion industry has been slow to recognize the profession. The Council of Fashion Designers of America did not create a Styling Award until 2022. (That year, the C.
F.D.A.
honored Roach, and it has subsequently discontinued the category.) But Roach, who prefers to call himself “an image architect,” has shown that stylists have real clout. Earlier this year, for the world première of “Dune: Part Two,” in London, he and Zendaya chose a vintage Thierry Mugler robot suit reminiscent of the Fritz Lang sci-fi classic “Metropolis.
” (Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya’s “Dune” co-star, “was, like, ‘What the fuck?,’ ” Roach said, miming shock.) The look generated a hundred and fifty-two million dollars for Mugler in media-impact value, according to Launchmetrics, a company that measures brand awareness. Roach’s signature technique is what the Vogue writer André Wheeler has termed “method dressing,” a form of styling that plays with themes and motifs drawn from a performer’s role.
His process can rival some movies’ production schedules in length. He spent two years developing the gown that Zendaya wore to the Venice world première of the first “Dune” movie—a high-slit beige leather dress with ruching that made it cling to her body as if wet. During filming, in the summer of 2020, the actress, who stars as Chani, a native of the desert planet Arrakis, sent Roach an image of the model Liya Kebede in a chocolate-brown leather corset from Balmain’s collection which was molded to her torso.
“Could we do this as a gown?” she texted. Roach asked Olivier Rousteing, Balmain’s creative director, if the corset could be turned into a dress. Rousteing agreed.
They decided to make it in a lighter shade of brown, to evoke a sand dune. A team of plaster casters was dispatched to Zendaya’s home in Los Angeles to cast a mold of the actress. “I was standing in my back yard and these people covered my body,” Zendaya told me.
“It was the same company that does casts for pregnant bellies.” Method dressing made headlines in 2023, thanks to “Barbie.” Andrew Mukamal, Margot Robbie’s stylist for the movie’s press tour, put together pretty-in-pink looks and retro ensembles that captured Barbie in her many eras, working with designers such as Daniel Roseberry, of Schiaparelli, and Donatella Versace to create pieces inspired by the iconic doll.
In less assured hands, method dressing can get costumey. It can also be tonally off, as when, this summer, Blake Lively wore sparkly florals during the press tour for her new film, “It Ends with Us,” about a domestic-violence survivor who runs a flower shop. Roseberry told me, “I can always tell when a stylist is trying to pull a ‘Roach.
’ It feels like the real thing, but it’s not. I’ve started calling this phenomenon Diet Roach.” Roach is known for digging deep into designers’ archives to source what fashion nerds call “insane pulls.
” When he was trying to come up with sci-fi-inspired looks for a “Dune: Part Two” première in Seoul, he remembered a gray skirt suit designed by Alexander McQueen for Givenchy’s Fall/Winter 1999 collection, which had red detailing on the front that resembled a computer’s motherboard. “I have, like, a crazy mental Rolodex of what I’ve seen before,” Roach told me. “I stay up late on Instagram just looking at the vintage stores, their pages, what they have.
” He tracked the suit down at a store called Aralda Vintage, in L.A. He was in London at the time, and he phoned his tailor there, Nafisha Tosh, to see if she could alter it, a tricky task considering that the red design contained a liquid that made it glow in the dark.
But Roach was in luck—Tosh had worked on the original McQueen design and knew how to tailor it. “That’s how the universe works,” Roach said, adding that one day he wants to write a book on manifesting. It was the day after the “Bittarverse” shoot, and Roach and I were having breakfast at the St.
Regis hotel, in midtown. Roach is tall and broad-shouldered; even sitting, he towered over me. His imposing figure clashed with his voice, which is as soft as cashmere.
He was wearing a pair of white lace bell-bottoms from Simone Rocha, black cowboy boots that he bought on eBay, and a blue Louis Vuitton football jersey. He took frequent sips of tea as he peered out the window toward Central Park. He was still jet-lagged, he told me, tucking his hair behind his ears.
His long black tresses are an homage to Cher, whose variety show he watched reruns of as a boy. He had just flown in from Paris, where he had accompanied Zendaya to promote her partnership with On, the Swiss running-wear company, during the Olympics. For the Games, Roach styled her in a vintage Jean-Charles de Castelbajac romper with colorful loops that looked like the Olympic rings.
Earlier that month, Roach had been a guest at the star-studded Mumbai wedding of the Indian billionaire Anant Ambani. (He also styled Anant’s sister Isha for the cover of Vogue India. ) It has been a busy year for Roach, despite the fact that he is officially retired.
In March, 2023, he announced on Instagram that he was quitting styling. “My cup is empty,” the post began. Zendaya is his only remaining full-time client, but dressing her in 2024 for the press tours of “Dune: Part Two” and “Challengers,” in which she starred as a tennis player turned coach, gave him plenty to do.
He also styled Céline Dion for the 2024 Grammy Awards and for the cover of French Vogue , the singer’s first appearances following her retreat from public life, in 2022, when she received a diagnosis of stiff-person syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. (He styled her in a pink Alaïa fur bubble coat for that cover. Roach, affecting a French Canadian accent, recalled her saying, “I want to wear it out!”) Next month he’s publishing a book, “How to Build a Fashion Icon,” a stylist’s memoir accessorized with tips for the Everywoman (and man) looking to dress like that girl.
“I like the way I sit now in the landscape,” he told me. “I can do special things with special people.” Roach was born in 1978, and raised by a single mother on the South Side of Chicago.
He was the eldest of five children, and he recalls that there were times when the family did not have enough money for food. But his mother kept them fed. She “could go to the grocery store and read people’s body language before interacting with them,” he writes in his book.
“Each time she would leave with her groceries paid for.” (Roach told me that memories of those days stopped him from giving up when designer after designer refused to dress his clients: “I think I go into any situation knowing there’s a yes in somebody somewhere.”) When he was fourteen, his mother moved in with her boyfriend.
She took Roach’s four siblings but left him to fend for himself. “I was too old to come,” he said. Before she left, she told him, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.
” The warning instilled in him a hustle mentality that he has struggled to shake off. “When someone tells you that and gives you that responsibility as a child, it changes the way that you approach life,” he told me. He stayed in his family’s house alone until the utilities were shut off.
“It got too cold,” he said. Eventually, a friend’s parents took Roach in. He also spent time at his grandmother’s house, where, he writes in his book, he first came under the spell of style: “The night before an important event, she would press and lay out what she was going to wear and put her hair in rollers.
Then when morning came, I would sit at her feet as she put it all on, watching her transform into the confident woman the world would see. It was like magic in front of my eyes.” Sundays at church were his first fashion shows.
“This was church in the eighties, before the whole ‘come as you are’ thing,” he said. After service, he and his grandmother would go thrift-store shopping, or “junking,” as she called it. Roach had a gift for spotting “diamonds in the rough.
” As he got older, friends noticed, and began putting in requests. In the late nineties, Roach enrolled in Chicago State University, a predominantly Black school on the city’s South Side. There he became friends with a fashion-forward woman named Siobhan Strong.
“We didn’t like each other at first,” Strong said. “He thought he was best dressed, and I thought I was best dressed.” In 2009, the two opened a vintage-clothing store in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago called Deliciously Vintage.
They stocked it in part by sourcing clothes from estate sales and auctions. Strong remembers attending a sale of items from Fashion Fair, Ebony magazine’s travelling fashion show, which raised money for African American charities. “We went every day ,” Strong said.
Deliciously Vintage got national media attention when Kanye West, Strong’s friend and another Chicago State alum, stopped in to pick up a gift for his then girlfriend, the model Amber Rose. “He bought a pair of MCM shades,” Roach told me. “We were so geeking out, like, ‘Oh, Amber got on my glasses!’ ” In his book, Roach writes that one of his favorite movies is “Mahogany,” from 1975, a bittersweet film that stars Diana Ross as an aspiring designer from the South Side of Chicago who travels to Italy and gets swept up in the world of high fashion, leaving her community-organizer boyfriend (Billy Dee Williams) behind.
Roach’s own story follows a similar arc from rags to runways. He was first inspired to become a stylist in 2008, while watching an episode of the reality-TV show “The Rachel Zoe Project,” which followed a high-powered Hollywood stylist whose clients included Cameron Diaz and “Mean Girls”-era Lindsay Lohan. Roach already admired June Ambrose and Misa Hylton—Black, New York-based stylists who worked with artists such as Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, and Lil’ Kim, helping to define hip-hop style.
But Zoe had access to an entirely different world. “I didn’t see anybody who was Black that was doing the things that Rachel was,” he said. “She was going to Paris.
She was backstage talking to Mr. Armani. I was, like, ‘Shit.
I want that.’ I wanted Hollywood. I wanted Paris Fashion Week.
I wanted to go to the couture shows. She gave me something to dream about. And it all came true.
It all came true.” Link copied After West’s visit, Deliciously Vintage started attracting other high-profile customers, some of whom engaged Roach’s services as a stylist. He worked with Eva Marcille, a contestant on “America’s Next Top Model,” and the R.
& B. singer K. Michelle.
In 2011, Roach writes, “I got a call that would change my life.” A regular at the store phoned to tell him about a friend’s fourteen-year-old daughter, an actress named Zendaya, who needed help picking out something to wear to the première of the Justin Bieber concert documentary, “Never Say Never.” Roach flew to California to take her shopping.
“I remember he had this YSL bag,” Zendaya told me. “It had ‘YSL’ spelled out in buckles. At the time, I don’t think I’d ever seen a bag like that in person.
” They went to Kitson’s, in Santa Monica, where Roach helped her pick out a shiny gray blazer and a matching leather skirt. It was a daring look for the young actress, and she was afraid of what others might think. Roach gently put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Who gives a fuck?” Zendaya, laughing, recalled the outfit: “I remember we thought, wow, we were really going for it.
Metallic and patent at the same time.” Shortly thereafter, Roach closed Deliciously Vintage and moved to Los Angeles to work with Zendaya full time. In the early years of her career, Zendaya was best known for playing a high-school sleuth on “K.
C. Undercover,” and luxury brands did not believe that she could carry their fashions to market. Roach revealed on the podcast “The Cutting Room Floor” that Chanel, Saint Laurent, Dior, Gucci, and Valentino had all turned down the opportunity to dress her.
“If it’s a no now, it’s a no forever,” he warned them. Roach went into hustle mode. “I figured out that whoever got the most press got the best dresses, so I was, like, I need to get her more press,” he told me.
In the hope of getting her into Us Weekly’s “Who Wore It Best” poll, he intentionally put her in clothes other celebrities had been photographed wearing—typically a stylist faux pas. But Roach didn’t mind the competition. “Because I know she’s going to win a battle,” he said.
In 2014, a publicist for various European fashion houses hesitated to lend Roach a black-and-teal Ungaro dress for Zendaya to wear to the Grammy Awards. (The publicist told me, of her thinking, “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.”) Roach was unmoved—literally.
“I wouldn’t leave,” he said. In the end, he got the dress. Fausto Puglisi, then the creative director of Ungaro, saw Zendaya on the red carpet in his creation and invited her to the Met Gala.
“That was special,” Zendaya told me. “It was our first Met. Law and I were kind of like babies to that experience.
” The job of celebrity stylist is a relatively new one. During the golden age of Hollywood, studios had costume designers create stars’ wardrobes for their off-camera lives as well as their movie roles, so that they would appear naturally, effortlessly stylish. After the collapse of the studio system, in the nineteen-sixties, actors were on their own.
An Instagram account called Nightopenings captures the ensuing sartorial chaos. There is a photo of the comedian Sinbad at the première of “Beethoven’s 2nd” wearing a fanny pack and a towel over his shoulder. Another shows Ally Sheedy arriving at the première of “The Dream Team” in a pink “Jane Fonda Workout” sweatshirt.
The rise of the stylist is often attributed to the sixty-first Academy Awards, in 1989, when Jodie Foster won her first Oscar, for “The Accused.” She wore an off-the-rack baby-blue taffeta dress that she bought in Rome while shopping with her mother. Foster was lambasted in the media for looking as if she were going to the prom.
“I have no idea who was the designer,” she later told the Hollywood Reporter . (There was not yet a Joan Rivers asking, “Who are you wearing?”) Wanda McDaniel, a former journalist who had been hired by Giorgio Armani to get his clothes on the red carpet, called Foster to offer her services. At the time, most European fashion houses saw Hollywood as gauche, leaving Armani with a largely untapped market.
Thanks to McDaniel’s efforts, so many A-list attendees arrived at the 1990 Oscars in his clothes that Women’s Wear Daily dubbed the show “The Armani Awards.” At its most basic level, the role of stylist is that of a go-between, connecting designers and clients. But a truly great stylist can generate the kind of press that helps change the trajectory of an artist’s career.
In 2014, a relatively unknown actress named Lupita Nyong’o was nominated for an Oscar for her first major movie role, in “12 Years a Slave.” Her stylist, Micaela Erlanger, treated every public appearance in the lead-up to the Academy Awards as if it were the main event—putting the actress in a vintage Valentino mod-style dress for a SAG Awards party and a tight mocha-brown Stella McCartney dress with an asymmetric shoulder at the Producers Guild Awards. Nyong’o won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and scored one of the most lucrative beauty contracts in the industry, as Lâncome’s brand ambassador.
Afterward, the Times ran an article about how her team had used the red carpet, praising the “military precision” of their campaign. After breakfast, Roach and I made our way down to SoHo to go vintage shopping. He wanted to watch me try out an exercise in his book that he called Reviewing the Archives.
Following the book’s instructions, I had gathered photographs of myself in outfits that I loved and jotted down descriptions of how they looked and how I felt in them. “Take note,” Roach writes, “of a few key words from your answers. You will start to notice some repeating themselves as you do this for different looks, and your own unique style preferences will begin to reveal themselves.
” It turned out that my key words were “monochromatic,” “sexy,” and “comfortable.” At our first stop, a bustling vintage store called 2nd Street, I paused at a pair of maroon velvet hot pants with an elastic waistband, realizing that they satisfied all three of my criteria. Roach’s eyes widened.
“Your ass is going to be hanging out,” he said, laughing. I asked if he was learning anything about me. “Oh, I know exactly who you are,” he said.
Roach, who studied psychology in college, compared his initial meeting with a client to an “intake.” (Indeed, his first job out of school was doing intake at a mental-health facility.) In 2016, when he met Céline Dion for the first time, the two spent eight hours together in a hotel room in Paris, playing with racks of clothes that Roach had brought with him.
Dion was known for wearing elegant gowns and silk scarves. But Roach noticed her perking up at clothes of a different sort altogether: streetwear. “So I started bringing her Off-White, Vetements, Balenciaga,” he told me.
That year, Roach styled Dion for Haute Couture Week in Paris. One day, she wore an eight-hundred-and-eighty-five-dollar oversized sweatshirt from Vetements that was emblazoned with the image of a sinking Titanic and the fear-struck faces of Rose and Jack, along with distressed skinny jeans and a pair of Gucci gold lamé heels. Like the doomed ship, the Internet broke in half.
“Oh, my God. She was just the most incredibly dressed,” Edward Enninful, the former editor of British Vogue , told me. “And you just knew somebody was behind it.
” In “How to Build a Fashion Icon,” Roach writes, “ I can tell when to push someone out of their comfort zone, when to be more forceful with my vision, and when to pull back. That’s the psychologist’s training.” In 2023, he styled Hunter Schafer, Zendaya’s co-star on the HBO series “Euphoria,” for Vanity Fair’s Oscars after-party.
She was drawn to a racy look by Ann Demeulemeester—a long white skirt with a top comprising a single white feather. Schafer and Roach referred to it merely as “the titties.” “Obviously, the look was a lot,” Schafer said.
“But thankfully Law loves to break rules, and so do I.” I asked Schafer if they debriefed the following day. “Well, no,” she said, giggling.
“I woke up the next day to Law’s Instagram post about retiring, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God—was the look too much?’ ” Another client, Naomi Campbell, said that Roach knows how to make the riskier choice the more appealing one. “The thing Law says when he styles me is ‘I have something, but it’s just an idea. I don’t think you’re going to go for it,’ ” she told me.
“That’s normally the one I go for.” At 2nd Street, Roach handed me a pair of Vivienne Westwood high heels to try on. While I was stepping into them, he grabbed the Keds I had worn all over New York City and put them in his black Birkin bag so that I wouldn’t revert to flats.
Training clients to walk in heels is a key element of red-carpet styling. Navigating the sand carpet at the “Dune: Part Two” world première was so challenging that Roach had to work with Warner Bros. to choreograph every step Zendaya took at the event.
“Everything had to be timed out to the minute,” he told me. “We had diagrams. It was incredibly mapped out.
” When I opened the dressing-room curtain to show Roach how I looked in the velvet hot pants, I found myself leaning against the wall and kicking one heel up. Roach smiled. He knew this reaction.
“Céline gets a wiggle,” he said. “She has this new walk when she’s feeling a look.” Roach learned about the transformative power of the right pair of heels from his mother’s favorite film, “The Wiz,” the 1978 remake of “The Wizard of Oz,” set in Harlem and starring an all-Black cast, with Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, and a Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King) who runs a sweatshop in the garment district.
“It’s a fashion movie,” he said matter-of-factly. In 2019, Roach collaborated with Vera Wang to create a slinky green gown inspired by the Emerald City for Zendaya to wear to the Emmy Awards. Many of Roach’s early fashion touchstones were classics of nineteen-seventies Black cinema, along with beloved African American magazines.
“It was Ebony and Jet , not Vogue ,” he told me. Roach often pulls archival looks that honor Black female style legends from earlier eras. In 2020, he styled Zendaya for the cover of Essence , drawing inspiration from the sixties icon Donyale Luna, often called the “first Black supermodel.
” Roach re-created one of Luna’s memorable looks with a custom crocheted dress by GiGi Hunter, an African American designer who made extensive use of knitwear in the eighties. Puglisi, who is now the creative director of Roberto Cavalli, emphasized that Roach “does not use archival looks because it’s fashionable”; rather, he uses them “because he knows what the original collection represents. He’s deep in that.
He knows. He knows.” For the 2021 Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards, Roach styled Zendaya in an archival YSL dress that had been custom-made for Eunice Johnson, who directed Ebony’s Fashion Fair, and which he still had from his Deliciously Vintage days.
“It was exciting to pay homage,” Zendaya told me. “We try to use fashion as a tool to show our respect and appreciation for people who’ve paved the way before us.” Those efforts have not always been appreciated by the fashion press.
In 2015, for the Oscars red carpet, Roach put Zendaya in a silky Vivienne Westwood gown with her hair in dreadlocks. The following week, on an episode of E!’s “Fashion Police,” the host, Giuliana Rancic, complained that Zendaya’s hair looked like it “smells like patchouli oil or weed.” (She later apologized.
) The fashion historian Jonathan Square, the author of the forthcoming book “Negro Cloth,” about the impact of slavery on the development of the American fashion industry, told me he considers Roach “part of the radical Black tradition.” He pointed to Roach’s decision to style Zendaya, for the 2022 N.A.
A.C.P.
Image Awards, in a 1957 Balmain gown that was red, black, and green, the colors of the Pan-African flag. “It was really subtle,” Square said. “When Balmain made that gown, he wasn’t thinking about Pan-Africanism.
But I love that Roach saw that and put his own spin on it.” Link copied After 2nd Street, Roach and I made a stop at Rick Owens, known for austere, apocalyptic-chic designs. The staff immediately recognized Roach and led him up a dramatic staircase that looked like a prop out of “Dune.
” On the second floor, Roach was ushered to a back room full of flowy gray garments. While I was trying to come up with a metaphor to describe them, I heard him say, “I should get this for my friend. He thinks he’s King Tut.
” I turned around to see Roach in a long shirt with an image of an Egyptian pharaoh printed on it. Roach is known for sartorial literalism. “Like, literally a tennis-ball shoe, or a tennis figure on my dress,” Zendaya told me of her “Challengers” looks.
That directness, which feels of a piece with Roach’s personality, can catch you by surprise, since he is so soft-spoken. “What’s Josh O’Connor like?” I asked him, of Zendaya’s co-star in “Challengers” and the Internet’s boyfriend du jour. He replied, “I think he knits and shit.
Definitely sexy.” I asked him if people approached him in stores to get his opinion of their outfits. He nodded and rolled his eyes.
“I hate that, because I can’t lie,” he said. In recent years, Roach has become a familiar figure, walking red carpets and appearing as a guest judge on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and “America’s Next Top Model.” He also co-hosted the first season of “OMG Fashun,” a reality series on Peacock in which designers craft looks from everyday materials—a nod to Roach’s “junking” days.
He hosted three seasons of the HBO Max series “Legendary,” a reality show that celebrated the queer subculture of ballroom, in which performers from competing houses (many named for French fashion houses, such as Saint Laurent and Balmain) “walk” the runway—usually with some dancing or voguing thrown in. Square, the fashion historian, sees in Roach’s celebrity a refusal to be pushed to the margins as so many Black people in fashion before him were, including the undersung designers Ruby Bailey, of the Harlem Renaissance, and Zelda Wynn Valdes, often credited with designing the Playboy Bunny costume. “Law refuses to be invisibilized.
He is very insistent on his labor being recognized,” Square added. Roach’s retirement post in 2023 went viral. “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! You win . . .
I’m out.” There was speculation that Roach was responding to comments made by his client Priyanka Chopra, who had just told an audience at SXSW that someone had described her as not “sample sized.” Roach, interviewed by the Cut, denied that the story was about him, saying, “I’ve never had that conversation with her, ever.
” He told me that his post came amid a busy week—the Oscars were taking place that Sunday, and he had to style six clients for the red carpet at the Vanity Fair after-party. Meanwhile, a client he was supposed to dress for the Met Gala had heard from a design house that Roach was not responding to its calls. “I was, like, ‘It’s the Oscars.
The Met Gala is seven weeks away,’ ” he said. “I felt like everything I do in this industry, everything I become, I’m still on the phone defending myself and basically fighting with these people.” The morning after the Oscars, Roach posted his statement.
“I was in an S.U.V.
when I sent it,” he told me. “I was with my publicist. We were in Miami for the Hugo Boss show.
I was in tears, saying, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ” Roach felt that the Met Gala melee was a symptom of how Hollywood treats stylists: “It’s a service job.” He believed that this was all the more true for stylists of color, in a society where minorities are seen as “the help,” not the talent.
It was not until 2021 that a Black person—Roach—topped the Hollywood Reporter’s list of the twenty-five most powerful stylists. He came in first again in 2022. A month after he announced that he was retiring, Roach ran into Rachel Zoe at a fashion showcase.
“He looked at me,” Zoe told me. “And I looked at him and said, ‘I see you. I know.
’ ” Zoe, who stepped back from celebrity styling in 2014, said that the challenge with making styling work as a business is that you cannot scale it; doling work out to assistants is tricky. As Zoe put it, clients are thinking, “If I’m spending this money, I want the person there. I don’t want their No.
3, right?” Roach and I discussed an episode of “The Rachel Zoe Project” in which Zoe is diagnosed as having stress-induced vertigo. Roach could relate. In 2019, he posted a picture of himself from a hospital bed, where he had undergone surgery to remove a benign abdominal mass.
The caption read “I’ve literally been working almost every day for the last 5-or-6 years chasing success. In doing so I’ve neglected my health, love life, and sometimes my happiness.” He told me that he began feeling stomach pain in 2017 but delayed taking time off to treat the condition.
“I was starting to break through,” he said. “I was styling Céline. I was on ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ working with Ariana Grande on her Dangerous Woman Tour.
I wasn’t going to stop working.” After the surgery, Roach still did not slow down, and his personal life began to deteriorate. In 2021, he got word that his uncle had died.
Roach, busy styling clients, called his cousin and asked if she could change the date of the funeral. “In hindsight, I’m mortified that I asked her that,” he writes in his book. That November, his three-year-old nephew fell to his death from the seventeenth floor of a Chicago high-rise—a tragedy he never stopped working long enough to properly grieve.
Roach knew that he needed a break, but taking it easy didn’t come naturally to him. “Growing up the way I did, I didn’t have an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” he said. Roach came up on the Chicago fashion scene alongside the late designer Virgil Abloh, the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton.
He told me that he last saw Abloh in Qatar at a retrospective of the designer’s work in 2021, weeks before his death, at the age of forty-one, from a rare form of heart cancer. “I sometimes look down at my phone and his contact will just be there,” Roach said. “It has happened to me like five times since he passed away.
It’s the weirdest thing.” When Abloh died, he was eulogized as part of a line of Black artists—including Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde, and Chadwick Boseman—whose lives were cut short by illness. Their deaths were felt by many to have been hastened by their workloads, and the myriad pressures levied on the young, gifted, and Black.
“I think in this country, especially as Black people, we’re taught to suffer through things,” Roach told me. “You almost wear your suffering like a badge of honor. I think when I retired I learned that wasn’t anything to be proud of.
” Naomi Campbell was also at the Hugo Boss show in Miami when he announced his retirement. In his book, he says that she “burst out of her dressing room and said ‘Law, I want to talk to you.’ ” She told him, “You cannot quit.
You cannot let them win.” Campbell called Enninful, from British Vogue , and put him on speakerphone. “It was a tag team,” Enninful joked when we spoke.
He added, “There was no way I was going to just let him retire without pointing out how important he was in the industry, not only as a great stylist but also as a person of color in fashion. There aren’t that many of us. A lot of young people were looking up to him on social media.
I always say, If you can see it, you can be it. I wasn’t going to let that go away.” But one of the things that make Roach a successful stylist is that he is exacting and decisive.
He knew he wanted out, just as he knew he wanted Zendaya to wear white Christian Louboutin So Kate pumps as her signature shoe. Roach had been invited to walk the Hugo Boss runway along with DJ Khaled, Pamela Anderson, Campbell, and other celebrities. “There was this big water fountain” near the runway, he told me.
“And it was windy in Miami. I remember the water hitting my face and my hair and my clothes, and I was wet, and I just, I don’t know, it just felt so spiritual.” It felt, he said, “like a baptism.
” In August, I visited Roach at his stately, twenty-one-thousand-square-foot home outside Atlanta. He gave me a tour of the leafy grounds, all seventeen acres, in a golf cart. “Do you play golf?” I asked as he drove.
“Absolutely not,” he answered. We passed a tennis court. “Did Zendaya try to get you into tennis?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” he repeated, laughing. This was supposed to be a place where Black people did not break a sweat. Roach bought the property after doing some genealogical research in 2019, attempting to find out where his last name came from.
In the process, he discovered the will of a slaveowner named Roach in Tennessee, in which the man bequeathed a five-year-old slave boy to his nine-year-old son. “I couldn’t sleep for days thinking about that,” he told me. “Could you imagine somebody giving a child a human being as basically a toy?” He became obsessed with the idea of owning a plantation as an act of reclamation.
“I thought, like, what joy it would be to have land that my ancestors possibly toiled on and died on,” he said. He found a place in North Carolina that still had intact slave quarters, but he couldn’t afford it. His real-estate agent suggested a property in Georgia instead.
It wasn’t a plantation, but the feeling was the same for Roach. When his nieces from Chicago visit, they take a “gratitude walk” around the premises. Inside the palatial home, the walls were covered with evocative and sensual paintings by Black artists, such as Genesis Tremaine and Ian Micheal.
One, by the latter, showed two dark-skinned men sitting poolside in pink Speedos. Roach told me that he got into art collecting after his agent bought him a Kehinde Wiley print during the pandemic. “He was, like, ‘You need to start buying art and stop buying so many bags,’ ” Roach said.
He does not work with an art buyer. “I just buy what I like,” he added. We were chatting in a sitting room as we waited for lunch to be delivered from a local Jamaican restaurant.
Roach was wearing a pair of silk Prada pajamas with teal and brown stripes, his hair in long braids covered by a gray wool cap. On the wall between us hung a painting of Roach in the nude, his body posed away from the viewer with his head turned demurely over his left shoulder, like the subject of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s “La Grande Odalisque.” The painting also features objects from Roach’s real life: a rug he picked up in India; a photograph by Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to shoot a Vogue cover (of Beyoncé, in 2018).
Doorbell. Our lunch had arrived. Roach brought the plastic bag to his dining-room table and laid out containers of red snapper, red beans and rice, and plantains.
I told him I had rewatched “Mahogany.” I had been texting with my mother about the ending, in which Mahogany, even as her début runway collection is met with a standing ovation, decides to return to her boyfriend on the South Side. “I don’t understand why she leaves Italy,” I texted my mom.
“Me neither,” she responded. “I couldn’t believe she went back to that broke man in Chicago! Lord!” As the credits rolled, I wondered what Mahogany did with her creative energy after giving up her career. I pictured her tossing and turning in bed next to Billy Dee Williams as new ideas for silhouettes and necklines came to her in her dreams.
Here in Georgia, Roach was searching for that secret third thing between leisure and labor: the Devil wears Prada pajamas. But, with New York and Paris Fashion Weeks looming, he admitted that he was getting antsy. “The clothes.
They keep calling me back,” he said. In a few weeks, he would be back at the Guggenheim, sitting in the front row of the Alaïa show at New York Fashion Week. Later, he would make his way to Paris, where he planned to style Zendaya for the Louis Vuitton show.
Over bites of fish, I asked Roach if he still had anything left from that Ebony Fashion Fair sale. Next thing I knew, he leaped from his seat, scurried off in a pair of white slippers to a closet somewhere, and returned with an Ungaro fur coat dyed mustard yellow. “Go ahead,” he said, nudging me.
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