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Style Points is a weekly column about how fashion intersects with the wider world.
When Law Roach takes on a new client, he starts by what he calls “surveying the land.” That means going back and looking at every red carpet look they’ve ever worn, sometimes going back decades. Listening to interviews, tuning in to how what they wore made them feel. Then constructing, in his words, “the blueprint,” and working with “the contractors” (hairstylists, makeup artists, etc.) to create the final look.
If it seems like Roach is throwing around a lot of architectural terms, that’s because he doesn’t see himself as a stylist, per se. “If you just run out and get someone a dress and help them get dressed, technically you’re a stylist,” he says, “but I thought my process and what I was delivering for my clients and the value I was adding to them was a little bit more elevated than that….When I get a new client, I can look at the old pictures of them that I wasn’t there for, and I can feel when something wasn’t right.” That’s why he settled on the term “image architect,” which he has since trademarked, to describe his approach.
Roach and Zendaya (in vintage Mugler) at the Dune premiere.
It might also explain why, when some press tours feel like prefab developments, with starlets in hastily-slapped-up looks from the designer du jour, Roach’s work always feels like it has a true foundation. For Zendaya’s press tour for Challengers, for example, he took the idea of tenniscore, which had already been kicking around the fashion sphere, and elevated it with a custom Thom Browne dress decorated with rackets and Loewe tennis-ball heels. To promote Dune: Part Two, the actress wore a robot suit from Thierry-era Mugler and a motherboard skirt set from Alexander McQueen-era Givenchy. The latter was an idea that popped up from his memory palace. (He called up a vintage dealer he works with: “Please ship it to London. We need it tomorrow.”)
“I see things and I bank them. I just have this huge Rolodex in my brain,” he says, casually dressed in a white tank, off-the-shoulder sweatshirt and cross necklace. “It’s all very emotional for me. I remember things that made me feel a certain type of way.”
Roach’s upcoming book How to Build a Fashion Icon: Notes on Confidence, out October 1, is not, as convention might have dictated, a memoir. That was certainly what people were expecting after his much-vaunted retirement last year. Instead, he defines the book as self-help. “If I have all these famous, beautiful women saying that they were able to find confidence or even more confidence from working with me, I just thought, what a wonderful thing it would be to give that to the masses,” he says. The book is dedicated to Zendaya, who he tells me is his “fashion soulmate” in addition to being “my muse, my little sister, one of my biggest advocates, if not my biggest advocate. She’s my therapist sometimes. Our relationship has grown beyond stylist-client. She’s one of the only people that can tell me that I did something stupid.”
Roach as a baby.
With Zendaya by his side, the self-described “little street kid from Chicago” climbed the ladder despite not going through the traditional channels of internships and assistant gigs. Growing up, he learned “how to survive and how to hustle, and poured it into this career that I wanted to pursue.” Taking “junking” trips to thrift stores with his grandmother helped him hone his vision. He loved the feeling of “endless possibilities” they offered. “High fashion didn’t feel possible” for him at the time, but he followed Tom Ford’s Gucci and John Galliano’s Dior. “The Galliano Dior couture shows were a dream. I remember going to my first couture show. I won’t say what it was, but I was like, ‘This isn’t couture.’ For me, couture is about showmanship and being fantastic and daydream-y.”
He also had a degree in psychology, which he says has been invaluable. “I tell anybody who’s ever worked for me that the job is more psychological than anything else. You have to pay attention to nonverbal cues, and what silhouettes and colors make people feel the best, without them even telling you.” It also helped him “read the room and the psychology of everybody else, outside of the client. Who are the gatekeepers and who is that person that can be your ally when you’re pushing for a certain look?”
Dion in 2016, wearing a Titanic-themed sweatshirt by Vetements.
When Roach began styling Céline Dion in 2016, headlines about her unexpected Vetements and Off-White looks led people to see the beloved pop diva in a whole new fashion-girl light. “People were like, ‘You changed her so much,’ and I’d always say, ‘I never changed her,’” Roach says. “Everything you saw when we started working together is who she’s always been on the inside. I don’t think anyone ever just gave her the allowance or the authority to be that. She was always that girl.” Dion, by his account, is a true fashion aficionado, keeping binders full of tear sheets. “She wanted to try everything, and I was like, ‘Oh, I see you. I know who this girl is.’”
“We just started to play and she told me, don’t hold back, bring her what I thought was cool, and then we saw the shift. She could be in couture looking very lady one day, and then it could be streetwear. She was the first celeb to wear Demna’s Balenciaga, Alessandro Michele’s Gucci. And these are things that she was buying. No one was lending her those clothes at that time,” he notes. “I didn’t change Céline Dion at all. I just helped her express what was just inside of her for so many years.”
Hunter Schafer, styled by Roach for the 2023 Oscars in Ann Demeulemeester.
I have some questions for Roach about red carpet trends that have exploded over the past few years. What are his thoughts on “method dressing” for a press tour, which has been become de rigueur for every blockbuster from Barbie to Wicked? “We’ve always done theme dressing, before it even had a name,” he says. “When you have someone like Zendaya who’s not afraid to be literal and take chances—Joan of Arc at the Met Gala—it’s fun and entertaining and it brings people joy. I think one of the biggest difference for me between Barbie and Tashi Duncan,” Zendaya’s character in Challengers, “is that we’ve known Barbie for, what, 60 years at this point? I thought what they did was really great and beautiful, but to use that same method dressing to introduce a character that nobody knows for the first time and to give her a personality and have people interested in her before they even see the movie is, I think, a testament on how powerful method dressing can be as a promotional tool. I just hope that the studios start to value the stylists who can do it well in a bigger way.”
Then there’s the opposite end of that spectrum: famous people who profess not to use stylists. When I express some doubt about the claim, he says, “There are people who say they style themselves, and exactly like you say, what does that mean? Who is calling in a rack? Who’s doing the returns? Who’s making sure you have all the right shoes, and who’s also your sounding board? All of that is part of the job. There are people who have innately great style who do make a lot of the choices of what they wear, and I think that’s great. Those are the people who make the best clients because they are great collaborators, but I think it’s kind of unfair for people to say that they do everything themselves, because I know they really don’t. Yes, there are people who have great relationships with designers and can get on FaceTime with them. But the bigger picture is that when celebrities choose to hire stylists, they are also choosing to work with a small business, and sometimes a small minority- or woman-owned business, and they are giving people jobs and helping them feed their families. It’s a way of keeping this ecosystem going, and if someone hires me as a stylist and they pay me, I’m hiring assistants and paying them. There’s a bigger picture to it than just picking out the dress.”
Law Roach.
What’s the biggest misconception about his line of work, I ask? He answers without a second’s hesitation: “That it’s easy and it’s glamorous and it’s fair. It is a tough job, and not always the most well-paying job either. I was blessed that I’ve always had a big business, but there are a lot of stylists that work with celebrities and can barely pay their bills. We saw a lot of that when COVID happened. A lot of people in the industry didn’t come back after that. But people think it’s glamorous and everybody’s making millions of dollars, and the studios are paying you these excessive fees and you make money from all these different things. That part isn’t as true as people think, and it’s a lot of anxiety and stress. You have someone who is going to go out and be seen and judged by millions of people around the world, and all those people have a platform and a voice and can say negative, nasty things.”
While he seems to be busier than ever, how is retirement treating him? Besides giving him the chance to write the book, he says it’s given him perspective. “Working the way I worked and becoming who I became put me on this pedestal that I never asked to be on. Being able to write this book, I just feel like I’ll be able to be tangible in a way, to touch more people than I could have ever with just the work. It gives me another way to use my voice, which makes me so happy. Retirement gave me so much power.”
During his decade of styling, “I felt like I worked every single day. I felt like I never had the option to say no. When I retired, I figured out that I didn’t know who I was outside of being this stylist/image architect, or working with these people. I don’t think I really had an identity of my own. It brought me peace and happiness, and this power to say, ‘I can do whatever I want.’ I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I could never style anybody again. They’re going to think I’m a liar. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, you never retired, it was a publicity stunt,’ and all these things, and it wasn’t. I really wanted to walk away. I wanted to not even work with Zendaya. She just wouldn’t allow it!”
Roach with Megan Thee Stallion at The Hollywood Reporter’s Power Stylists event in 2023.
So, much like Michael Corleone, he got pulled back in? “I was done. I was done-done. I wanted to go to my house in the country and just be done with fashion, but after I grieved it and had this rebirth, I’m like, ‘I could do whatever I want, when I want to do it.’ I came back and I did Naomi [Campbell] for the Cannes carpet and the opening of the V&A. I popped in and did one thing with Megan [Thee Stallion] that ended up in the Renaissance Tour movie. I get to say yes to what I think is important or special, like working with [entrepreneur and investor] Mona Patel, who no one knew who she was, for the Met Gala, because the story meant so much to me.”
In the meantime, he’s been exploring different avenues: walk-on TV roles, making the book a potential series. And he’s grateful to Zendaya for not letting him fully leave his former post. “Had I retired completely, we wouldn’t have gotten the Mugler moment for the Dune press tour. We wouldn’t have gotten all the method dressing for Challengers,” he says. “What I do brings people joy, and I don’t want to deny that. I love to see people’s faces and their comments, how it gave them something to talk about at work and something to debate. It makes me feel good that my work is able to do that.”
Véronique Hyland is ELLE’s Fashion Features Director and the author of the book Dress Code, which was selected as one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year. Her writing has previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast Traveler.