The same goes for when Roach spotted the finale look from the debut runway collection of a then-up-and-coming design duo Matières Fécales on Vogue Runway. He immediately DMed them on Instagram to hold the dress before The Odyssey’s red carpets were in clear view. “I said, ‘Please, Zendaya has this movie coming. I can’t tell you too much. Please, hold this dress for me,’” says Roach. “They had no idea what the movie was at all, and they trusted. And so six months ago, we were in Paris, and we had a fitting with them, so they held it, and then we fit six months, and then they held it another six months till I was ready to wear the dress. I wrote them, I’m like, ‘I have a date finally.’” The time finally came almost two years later at the movie’s New York premiere, though Roach and Zendaya have shown their support for the brand in the time since. (Zendaya wore a distressed pink gown from the spring 2026 collection during The Drama press tour.)
Not every press-tour look necessitates years of planning. Roach explains that the pair’s process is more fluid—and sometimes spontaneous—than one might think. For the London premiere, Zendaya stepped out onto the red carpet in silicone molded bustier and LED illuminated fringed beaded skirt. If the look felt freshly familiar, it’s because it had walked the Schiaparelli couture runway in Paris that very morning. “[Daniel Roseberry] told me that there were three dresses that he thought I would love,” says Roach, but the Schiaparelli designer couldn’t share photos in advance. Roach, as a result, chartered a plane to Paris the evening before to see the collection in an intimate preview and stayed to watch the dresses in motion on the models’ bodies the following morning. It’s an extravagant errand that felt a little too familiar to people in the industry who have likely helped a friend find someone who can hand carry a garment bag from New York to Milan in less that a day’s notice.
“I feel like her fans and my fans and people who just follow the work, this is what they expect, and they expect it at a certain level,” explains Roach of the broader styling strategy. “They expect it to be entertaining.”
