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.”
“You’d be angry, too, if your alter ego was a successful physician.”
Cartoon by Tom Toro
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.
Timothée Chalamet “was, like, ‘What the fuck?,’ ” Roach said of Zendaya’s Mugler robot suit at the London première of “Dune: Part Two.”Photographs by Daniel Leal / Getty (Left); Aurelien Meunier / Stringer / Getty (Right)
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.”
