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ON THE HORIZON
Zendaya reprises her role as Peter Parker’s classmate Michelle
in Spider-Man: Far from Home, opening in July. Loewe dress.
rally in Charlottesville, and—famously—clapping back at
E! announcer Giuliana Rancic’s barbs about her dreadlocks
at the 2015 Academy Awards. That was the first time many
people outside the Disney demographic took note of her,
thanks to the messages of support she got from the likes of
Ava DuVernay, Kerry Washington, and Solange Knowles.
“That whole thing was so crazy,” she recalls of the firestorm.
“I mean, I’d basically snuck
onto the red carpet, the plus
one of a plus one.” At last
year’s Oscar ceremony,
Zendaya floated onstage in
a diaphanous Giambattista
Valli gown. “I got invited
back as a presenter,” she
notes matter-of-factly. “So
I guess I won.”
These days, Zendaya tells
me, she’s taking a particu-
lar interest in issues around
gentrification. She’s seen
it firsthand, watching her
grandmother nearly get
priced out of her house in
Oakland. “I keep think-
ing, Is there a way I can
help with this, through
art?” she asks. “I mean,
obviously, I’ve got a plat-
form”— about 55 million
people follow Zendaya on
Instagram—“but I also
know, don’t just post what-
ever. You’ve got to listen to
people. Talking is import-
ant. But walking the talk is
important, too.”
Tommy Hilfiger points
out that Zendaya’s commit-
ment to social justice is key
to her appeal. “There are
so many celebrities with big social-media followings,” he
notes, “but are they going to make a difference in society?
Right from our first conversations, it was clear she intends
to use her celebrity to fight for change. She’s got the heart
of an activist.”
Zendaya demurs when people call her that. “It’s nice,” she
says, “but I’m not. What I’d really like is to reach out to my
peers in the Bay Area. Like, there are kids I was in elementary
school with, who are out there doing the work. Organizing.
Maybe they can help me figure out what to do.”
You suspect that if Zendaya weren’t spending long days
on sets in Hollywood, leaving her vanishingly little spare
time, she’d be part of the growing cohort of young people
attending meetings of the Democratic Socialists of Amer-
ica and staging sit-ins in support of the Green New Deal.
And she’d be good at that, too, because Zendaya doesn’t
intimidate easily.
Her Tommy Hilfiger collaboration is an example. She
suspected they’d “promise the moon and the stars,” she says,
“then, in the end, all they would want to do is to slap my face
on their product.” So she and stylist Roach scoured the web
for disco-era images that inspired them, and walked into their
first formal meeting with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude and a
mood board that wowed the room.
“Anything Zendaya does, she does it, you know?” ex-
plains Roach. “Every design meeting, every sample review,
she was there. And she was
involved with all the cast-
ing,” he adds, referring to
the Paris runway show in
March. “She really want-
ed to pay homage to the
women who inspire her.
Like, what about Beverly
Johnson, the first black
woman to appear on the
cover of Vogue? How
about Veronica Webb, the
first model of color with a
major cosmetics campaign?
How about Pat Cleveland?
Can we get her?”
The TommyxZendaya
show wasn’t just a fashion
statement, in other words;
it was a statement of pur-
pose. The audience broke
out in applause for the
all-black cast of models—
Johnson, Webb, and Cleve-
land included—and then
they went into raptures
when 70-year-old disco
icon Grace Jones emerged
at the finale.
“We wanted a crescen-
do,” Roach says. “And I
said, ‘What about Grace?’
And Z just looked at me for
a second, and then she was
like—‘I would die.’ ”
“I mean, what can you even say about Grace?” Zendaya
muses to me as the Thai food arrives. “She’s fearless.”
S
o is Zendaya—but the Euphoria role did scare her.
“It’s a totally different thing than being the star
of K.C. Undercover,” she says, referring to her
final Disney project. “That first day on set, I was
honest-to-God terrified.”
You wouldn’t have known it, according to co-
star Hunter Schafer, who plays Jules, Rue’s best friend—her
“ride or die.” In Schafer’s telling, one of Zendaya’s many
talents is to transmute fear into compassion. “She has a lot
of power to set the atmosphere,” Schafer says. “She could
not have been more down-to-earth and willing to do what-
ever it took to create a mood for the cast that was open and
sensitive. I felt totally supported.”
Zendaya’s social life currently revolves around the Euphoria
cast, many of whom are pictured in Polaroids taped up by the
stairs in her home, a wall of fame CONTINUED ON PAGE 146 PRODUCED BY CONNECT THE DOTS; SET DESIGN, SPENCER VROOM
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