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Cast your minds back to a mere month ago—a time before Zendaya rendered every iteration of the tenniscore aesthetic in dazzling custom Loewe or vintage Louis Vuitton designed by Marc Jacobs. The Challengers star currently has the zeitgeist’s attention captured in her serve of countless sportif looks, but it wasn’t too long before hand that she had us in a chokehold through the intergalactic planetary fantasy she was peddling to promote Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two.
In futuristic vintage Givenchy designed by Alexander McQueen to body-sculpting Alaïa that channelled the shape of the ‘Shai-Hulud’ (the greatest sandworm crawling through Arakasis’ desserts), we collectively tipped our space helmets to fashion’s greatest showman. Of course, the undoubtedly magnus opus look from the press tour came in fembot form when Zendaya arrived at the London premiere in Mugler’s archival “Gynoid” suit presented in his theatrical Fall/Winter 1995 runway show. (Yes, that hourlong latex and fashion legend-laden performance presented at Cirque d’Hiver in Paris).
In chrome and plexiglass, Zendaya and her “image architect” Law Roach offered up one of the greatest vintage-fashion pulls a red carpet has ever seen. The 27-year-old starlet cut through the sand of the red carpet with as much poise as her Freman character, Chani, possessed in the sequel, not to mention the Bulgari high jewellery heavy diamond necklace she wore around her neck.
As we reported at the time, the suit not only stole the show at the premiere but was arguably her greatest fashion look of all time. Now, Zendaya has divulged how the spectacular display came to be, and the realities and real-life risks of dressing as a cyboid in the name of style. “This suit, everybody knows it,” she began when dissecting the silhouette for Vogue’s ‘Life in Looks’ series. “I was like, ‘I wonder if I could wear that,’ and so I sent it to Law and I was like, ‘What if we wore this for the premiere?’”
Zendaya shared that Roach responded hesitantly: “Are you being serious? Don’t play with me. Like, don’t get me started on something and make me do this, and you’re gonna, like, chicken out at the last minute and be too scared to wear it.’ And I was like, ‘I mean, if we can do it.’”
The Emmy Award-winning actress then explained how the hinges on the literal moving sculpture mightn’t have enabled her to pull this look off, but both she and the Mugler team were thrilled that she could fit into the piece. “We tried it on and it fit like a glove, and I was like, ‘This is so crazy.’ And everybody was like, ‘Oh!’ It just felt very…meant to be,” she added.
But underneath the (literal) polished veneer, Zendaya revealed that there was a moment where she was contemplating not wearing it at all because of how dangerously constrictive the suit was.
“I think after wearing it for like 10 minutes or less than that, I got really lightheaded,” she noted. “The metal conducts and holds on to heat very quickly and kind of traps heat in. I’m wearing a complete bodysuit, so there’s a barrier, so you already have a layer of material kind of on your skin. As the days were coming up, I was like, ‘This is a bad idea. Like, why did I do this?’ But I put it on, I went out there, and I did it.” That she did.
Zendaya later changed into a custom Mugler dress designed by current creative director Casey Cadwallader.
Bridging house archives with contemporary codes isn’t only fitting for themes in the neo-feudalistic, sci-fi epic, but a skill that only she possesses. Yes, the look had us in a chokehold, but Zendaya in a literal grasp, too.
