How Zendaya Became Hollywood’s Reigning Red Carpet Queen

For weeks, it seems, the name on everybody’s lips has been Zendaya. Coming into the Challengers press tour, we all knew that Queen Z would show up to every red carpet ready to serve. After all, the looks she used to promote past films like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Dune: Part Two are still etched into our brains. Still, the eye-popping green and white ensembles she and stylist Law Roach have put together this year feel like their magnum opus; night after night, photo after photo, they’ve had us basically screaming “game, set, match!”

(Is that the correct usage of that term? I’ll be the first to admit that my interest in tennis began when Luca Guadagnino announced this movie, and will end after it premieres this weekend.)

From her tennis ball stilettos, to her preppy white halter dress appropriately adorned with tiny tennis rackets, to her 2013 Louis Vuitton green and white checkered mini jacket dress, Zendaya has nailed the perfect balance of preppy and campy with each and every Challengers outing. But what is it that makes her red carpet fashions so captivating in the first place?

According to the experts I spoke with, much of the appeal comes from her ability to play with a theme in both elegant and cheeky ways. It also doesn’t hurt that Zendaya looks like a model.

Journalist and The Daily Beast’s Obsessed contributor Esther Zuckerman, who wrote the book on red-carpet couture with Beyond the Best Dressed: A Cultural History of the Most Glamorous, Radical, and Scandalous Oscar Fashion, kept returning to a specific word to describe Zendaya’s looks: purposeful.

Looking back on all of Zendaya’s most memorable get-ups—like the gorgeous Vivienne Westwood gown that she wore to the 2015 Oscars, the archival 1995 Thierry Mugler cyborg suit she wore for Dune: Part Two, and her many, many Challengers fits—Zuckerman observed that Zendaya and Law Roach are deliberate and creative in how they craft a whole, cohesive outfit from head to toe. It’s not just about the gown, or the shoes, or the accessories; all of it is part of one well-executed vision. And unlike some celebrities who tend to rely heavily on their stylists, Zuckerman believes Zendaya plays an active role in shaping her visual brand.

“It’s very thoughtful. It’s very creative,” Zuckerman said of the collaboration. “It’s like two artists coming together.”

Beyond how put-together the outfits are, their real innovation is how they transform whatever movie Zendaya might be promoting into an aesthetic playground. It’s not unheard of for a movie’s stars to dress up in specifically targeted ways; Margot Robbie spent the entire Barbie press tour recreating the doll’s most iconic looks, and Zuckerman wagers that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo will be wearing green and pink for the foreseeable future, until Wicked premieres in November. Still, what we see from Zendaya and Law Roach feels different.

“As opposed to theme dressing, it’s sort of like variations on a theme,” Zuckerman said. “We’re taking the idea of ‘sci-fi fashion’ or ‘tennis fashion’ and spinning it out into something new.”

One could argue that theme dressing for promotional purposes has its roots in the early days of the Oscars, when studio designers dressed their stars for the big night. (Celebrity stylists weren’t a thing yet.) Elizabeth Castaldo Lundén—a fashion and cinema scholar who wrote the book Fashion on the Red-Carpet: A History of the Oscars, Fashion and Globalisation—noted that while fashion always had its place on the red carpet, interest surged in the 1950’s when the Oscars became televised. Back then, she said, it was not uncommon for stars to hit the red carpet wearing dresses that had been made for the film they were promoting.

“Today,” Castaldo Lundén said, “it’s much more complex because there is a synergy in these promotional events, in which you’re promoting several brands.”

When a star like Zendaya turns up on a red carpet to promote their film, they’re really working on three levels: Beyond promoting the movie, as stars have always done, they’re also promoting their own personal brands as well as the designer of whichever designer they might be wearing. If they’re really lucky, they might have a brand ambassadorship deal with a designer like Zendaya does with Louis Vuitton.

“So the business has diversified in which they’re thinking about the movie, but they’re also thinking about how they can profit from the fashion industry,” Castaldo Lundén explained. In some cases, a celebrity can only wear the brand they’ve got a deal with—which, to Castaldo Lundén, feels not unlike the old days, when the studios controlled their stars’ images like commodities. Swap out studios for fashion designers, and it’s basically the same thing.

The key to Zendaya’s success, then, might be how comfortably she’s able to strut between these two worlds—cinema and fashion. Her talent as an actress gets her the meaty on-screen roles, and afterward, her appearance and style make her one of the most consistently striking figures on the red carpet.

Unlike some stars, who will just throw on the gown their stylist or allied fashion brand gives them and be done with it, Zendaya and Roach seem to plan each press tour thoughtfully. The Spider-Man era saw Zendaya wearing a sparkly webbed dress one night, a Dr. Octopus-like Roberto Cavalli gown on another, and a green and purple Valentino ensemble on the Graham Norton Show. For Dune: Part Two, she went high-fashion with cut-out dresses and 3D gold pieces and forward-thinking shapes. And for Challengers, she embraced a little more levity with bright colors and playful cuts.

To Zuckerman, the mixture of new, forward-thinking looks with archival pieces is what’s really fascinating. “They’re looking into fashion history in addition to pushing forward,” she said. It helps, she added, that Zendaya looks the way she looks, which means that “designers are lining up to dress her.” As Castaldo Lundén put it, “She checks a lot of boxes that fit both the old way of thinking about fashion and the fashion industry and the new way of thinking.

“That and being able to be playful and to like dressing up makes a very good cocktail for success,” Castaldo Lundén said. If a less traditionally modelesque actress were to show to an afterparty in a neon dress with a tennis ball sticking out of her stomach in the middle, would we all be talking about it the same way, she wondered? Perhaps not.

Sadly, Zendaya does not have any further film releases on the horizon besides Dune: Messiah, which will presumably take a couple years. Alas, we’ll have to settle for her immaculate awards show looks to tide us over until she finds a new movie to ignite her thematic creativity. Until then, we’ll always have those tennis ball heels.