The celebrity stylist Law Roach says he buys vintage rather than borrowing it, and he wants the dealers who supply it treated like the small businesses they are.
Zendaya wore a black Givenchy couture gown to the 2024 Met Gala that had not been seen since John Galliano designed it the year she was born, and her stylist Law Roach made a point of telling everyone she paid for it. “Oh we buy,” he told Extra. Roach sourced the dress from the Los Angeles vintage house Lily et Cie. “How we look at it is that we’re really supporting small businesses, and I think it’s unfair to borrow from things from people who use those clothes as their livelihood,” Roach told the program.
Roach, the Chicago stylist who calls himself an image architect, has spent thirteen years building looks for celebrities including Céline Dion, Ariana Grande, Anya Taylor-Joy, Megan Thee Stallion, Venus Williams, and Tom Holland. He’s built Zendaya’s red carpet around vintage and archival fashion, a habit that began out of necessity when no major house would lend to a teenage Disney star. Now that the pair can borrow nearly anything, they still write checks to the dealers who supply the clothes. Roach reads the loan system, in which houses lend archive pieces to A-list talent in exchange for the exposure, as a poor fit for sellers whose inventory is their income. When Zendaya recreated a magazine cover for her “Challengers” press tour, she wore a piece from Annie’s Ibiza — the kind of independent vintage seller Roach likes to elevate to a global audience.
Roach’s position comes as resale has stopped being a fringe of the industry. The global secondhand apparel market is expected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing at roughly 10 percent a year, according to ThredUp’s 2025 resale report. In the United States, the secondhand clothing market grew five times faster than the broader retail clothing market in 2024. The dealers Roach buys from are operating inside one of the fastest-expanding corners of fashion, and a Zendaya appearance can turn a single seller into a destination overnight.
Roach knows the trade from the selling side. He started by moving finds out of the trunk of his car, then opened his Deliciously Vintage shops in Chicago and Harlem before styling ever paid his bills, according to Out. His support for small operators has shown up off the carpet, too; in 2020 he raised $100,000 for small, uninsured Black-owned businesses damaged during Chicago’s uprisings. He frames the resellers coming up behind him as the direct beneficiaries of the market he helped build.
“I’ve been championing vintage for all of my career, and I was at the forefront of bringing vintage and archival to the red carpet,” he told Interview. “I started my career selling vintage clothes, and I think the easiest way to be sustainable is just to wear something someone else has already worn and purchased. And I think that’s bred a whole new ecosystem of young archive and vintage dealers. And these people are making great livings off of something that was frowned upon years ago, thrifting, and secondhand clothes.”
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