These days, awards ceremonies are as much fashion shows as they are anything else. So it’s fitting that the main character of post-awards season chatter wasn’t one of the new owners of a little gold statue. It was celebrity stylist Law Roach, who publicly quit the profession right after one of the biggest weekends of his career.
“My Cup is empty…” Roach, 44, wrote in an Instagram caption beneath a graphic that read “RETIRED.” “If this business was just about the clothes I would do it for the rest of my life but unfortunately it’s not!”
The industry was shocked. At a time when luxury fashion plays an unprecedented role in public life, Roach was one of the most in-demand celebrity stylists (or “image architects,” as he called himself) in the world. These days, the step-and-repeat is a dynamic space where stars can set and reset their personal narratives, new audiences can be reached, and lucrative sponsorship deals can be sealed. Gone are the days of red carpet-side correspondents simply asking starlets Who are you wearing? We now expect more from our designer-clad celebs. Watching any of the nearly five hours of this month’s Oscars red carpet coverage, you might have heard a slightly more philosophical line of inquiry: What story are you trying to tell us with this outfit?
Roach had a special talent for seizing this moment, with a vision for virality and a fluency in important archival fashion that could turn both fresh stars (Zendaya, Anya Taylor-Joy) and established names (Céline Dion, Anne Hathaway) into style muses for a new generation of fashion obsessives. He became so intertwined with the success of his clients that Roach became a celebrity in his own right, swanning around fashion week with Zendaya and taking selfies with screaming fans outside shows. But as he told The Cut in an interview a few days after his surprise announcement, he had to hang up his steamer and walk away because, as he said, “I don’t wanna suffer anymore.”
The people who were not shocked? Other celebrity stylists, who know all too well the personal strain and power struggles that come with their position at the crossroads of Hollywood and the European fashion houses. In the days after Roach’s retirement, I spoke with several stylists and consultants who dress some of the biggest names in entertainment—Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, Pedro Pascal, and many others—about how they are being squeezed by fashion’s new alliance with Hollywood, the rise of social media critics, and even the sorry state of formalwear.
The Early Days
Prior to the early ’90s, celebrities were just like us: they dressed themselves. Then Giorgio Armani successfully muscled his brand of easy Italian luxury into Tinseltown. In 1990, he dominated the Oscars, dressing nearly all the biggest stars on the red carpet. The ceremony came to be known as the “Armani Awards.” In 1994, Joan Rivers began covering the red carpet for E!, and the race for fashion houses to get starlets in their gowns was well and truly on. Along came the stylists, who had to play a high-stakes balancing act. On one hand, the stylists had an enormous amount of power, controlling designer houses' access to their glittering clients. On the other hand, they worked at the pleasure of those clients—and at the mercy of the movie studios who footed the bills. It was a life of riches and glamor, built on a rickety foundation: the whims of movie stars and showbiz executives.
Social Media Scrutiny
Now, stylists also have to contend with the magnifying glass of social media. “Even five years ago, the red carpet social media thing was not as crazy as it is now,” says Ilaria Urbinati, the stylist behind Donald Glover’s ever-evolving red carpet ensembles. A few weeks out, #Oscars23 has 1.2 billion views on TikTok, with a striking proportion of the videos focusing explicitly on red carpet fits. The upside for a celebrity who can make a clear and ambitious red carpet statement—Timothée Chalamet’s shirtless Louis Vuitton getup at last year’s Oscars, for instance—has never been greater. An enormous fit can turn you into a fashion darling and front row regular overnight. But a bricked fit will be mocked mercilessly, and last online forever.
Some stylists, caught in the middle, are now being told to dial back their ambitions. “I've been on the phone with publicists and they're like, We want a Timothée Chalamet-level look,” says fashion editor and red carpet veteran Ian Bradley, referencing the daring, skin-baring fits worn by the young heartthrob and style eccentric. But when push comes to shove, Bradley says, the publicists “don’t actually want their client to do something they perceive as risky.” Clients are, somewhat understandably, also skittish, especially today, when celebrities often find themselves on the wrong side of debates and controversies raging online. “There are people who are just unsure how to present themselves in complex landscapes,” says Julie Ragolia, the stylist and consultant who collaborated with Pedro Pascal on the Mandalorian press tour that turned the actor into an unlikely style icon. “We're not in a wonderful time in the world. We’re not in a time of prosperity. We're not in a time of peace. We're on edge.”
Demand Outstrips Supply
Meanwhile, as the pandemic has eased, big events have boomed, and an industry-wide shift to more casual clothing (accelerated by the pandemic) has left stylists scrambling to fill their racks. “Commercially, brands aren't making as many gowns and evening suits and all that stuff as they were 10 years ago,” says Bradley. Stylist Karla Welch, who dressed no fewer than 11 people on Oscars weekend (including Justin and Hailey Bieber, Tracee Ellis Ross, Olivia Wilde, and Sarah Polley) says, “I think the biggest challenge is so many people, so few looks.”
Almost every stylist I spoke with said their timelines are getting shorter and shorter, too—Welch thought she was having a light Oscars, until she wasn’t. “That snuck up on me,” she says. “The stylist is always like the last to know of the talent schedule,” adds Bradley.
It can be hard to get clothes even when they’re available. Jyotisha “Joy” Bridges styles Lil Nas X, whose immense celebrity makes him something of a dream client. For Nas’s appearance at this month’s Versace show in LA, Bridges worked with Versace’s Milan atelier to create him a custom tank top and skirt, dipped in glittering jewels. By the standards of couture tailoring, the look came together at warp speed: just a week-and-a-half, according to Bridges. But for her clients who don’t have 12 million followers on Instagram, the process of getting any shred of clothing can take even longer. “People don’t understand, if your client is smaller, the way you have to beg and squeeze and offer your first child to get some clothes is insane,” she says.
Luxury houses go to great lengths to cultivate close relationships with prominent stylists, but they also fiercely guard against talent they consider off-brand. Recently, a representative of a storied Parisian house somewhat gleefully informed me that an A-list rapper who wore one of the label’s suits had been forced to purchase it in store. Even Zendaya couldn’t get clothes early in her career, as Roach recalled to The Cut: “The way that we came into the industry, nobody wanted to touch either one of us. Like nobody wanted to lend me clothes. Nobody wanted to dress her ’cause, at that time, Disney girls wasn’t considered real actresses.”
A Glamorous Gig?
“I’d say the job is like 40% creative, and 60% logistical,” says Bridges, who adds that most people falsely assume that the life of a fashion stylist is all parties and front rows. Bridges would know: that’s precisely why she wanted to get in the business in the first place, before she landed a coveted assistant job in Law Roach’s styling studio. “I had no idea that there was literally no glamor whatsoever once you really get in there,” she says. The 9-to-5 gig she thought she had signed up for quickly became a 24/7 rollercoaster, with Bridges often in the office late at night tracking packages en route from Paris while figuring out how to navigate the latest rumor about bad designer behavior or which brand was on the outs with insiders. “A lot of it is dealing with red tape and the political things going on in the industry,” says Bridges, whose former boss cited the punishing freelance lifestyle as a factor in his retirement. “I don’t wanna suffer no more,” Law Roach said in The Cut. “I don’t wanna be unhappy. I don’t wanna be at the beck and call of people and their teams. I wanna take some time and figure out, you know, how to live.”
Brand Deals Dominate
When Roach announced his retirement, his fans quickly found something to blame: Zendaya’s rumored new Louis Vuitton contract. Movie stars have had tight relationships with designers ever since Audrey Hepburn devoted herself to Hubert de Givenchy. But these days, exclusive brand ambassador deals are the bane of the fashion-obsessed, who see them as couture handcuffs, with Kristen Stewart’s Chanel tie-up being the most frequently maligned. A representative tweet goes something like: “Things that need to be free: healthcare and Kristen Stewart from her Chanel contract.”
Many stylists are also over such arrangements, despite the fact that they usually get cut into brand deals with their clients. “I think brands are doing a great disservice when they sign a talent and demand that every single look is by [the brand],” says Welch, who landed on The Hollywood Reporter's Hollywood stylist power list for 2023. “It takes out all of the fun of storytelling, and I think it can often impact both the celeb and the brands in negative ways.” When Welch styled Ruth Negga in her somewhat legendary Oscars run in 2017, Negga wore Valentino, Prada, Miu Miu, Givenchy, Gucci, Marc Jacobs, and Dolce & Gabbana, and also smaller brands like Erdem, The Vampire’s Wife, and Rodarte—becoming a fashion star in the process. “It was more important to have fun and tell stories and basically wear what we wanted,” Welch says. Of course, in Hollywood, money talks, and the money from fashion and jewelry contracts can help an actor take a role in that cool new A24 flick instead of another Marvel blockbuster. Welch puts it this way: “If someone was offering me $11 million to wear one brand, I’d also take it.”
Thanks to the amount of money being thrown around, and the increasing prevalence of full-look policies at fashion houses, smaller brands are getting squeezed out. Though emerging designers don’t tend to participate in talent blackouts, they also don’t have the unlimited shipping budgets of top-tier labels, or the ability to custom-make runway looks for talent who aren’t sample size. “Especially with today's fashion, it's easier when you are sample size to take more risks,” says Bridges. For stylists committed to giving emerging brands a platform, it’s not uncommon for them to barely break even on smaller jobs. “You wanna support the younger brands, but then you're like, Okay, am I gonna pay a thousand dollars in shipping?” says Bradley. And once they get the clothes to the fitting, stylists are often stymied by talent agents who kill any brands that might stand in the way of potential brand deals. “These goals of getting contracts start early on, so these publicists don’t understand the value of putting their clients in, like, a cool young English designer,” says Bradley. “It’s not about finding the best design for them, it becomes about maneuvering to get eyes from LVMH and Kering.”
Stylist Snubs
Perhaps the biggest threat to the Hollywood stylist status quo, though, is the fact that some of the most influential celebrity fashion fiends simply don’t want stylists. As Urbinati notes: “Men are competitive.” The rise of the stylist helps explain the impact of the “No Stylist” flex in hip-hop, which has become a calling card for the rambunctiously swagged-out lifestyles cultivated by Lil Uzi Vert, French Montana, and Future. Crucially, the No Stylist method is not confined to the red carpet. Nor is the workaday anti-style of guys like workwear connoisseur Daniel Day-Lewis and even baggy basketball shorts aficionado Adam Sandler, whose profound lack of interaction with the broader fashion conversation has captivated guys who also don’t often find themselves swanning down red (or champagne) colored carpets. It’s hard to argue that Timothée Chalamet’s annual shirtless appearances are more influential than Uzi’s turbo luxury streetwear habit.
Ultimately, though, Law Roach had it right when The Cut asked him what his clients were going to do following his retirement. He was unequivocal: “They’re gonna find a new stylist.”
Additional reporting by Eileen Cartter.
