The award-winning stylist revealed he didn't tell Zendaya before announcing his surprise retirement and shares her reaction.
Law Roach took many people by surprise when he announced his retirement on March 14, including his star client and close friend, Zendaya.
During a conversation with Emily Ratajkowski for her podcast, High Low With Emrata, the Image Architect revealed that he hadn't spoken with the Euphoria actress before he took to Instagram to announce his retirement, and she immediately called him when the news hit.
Explaining that he is part of a "core" four-person team supporting the Emmy-winning actress, Roach shares that his decision was "tough for her."
"She calls [and] she said, 'Girl, I thought we'd make big decisions together,'" he tells Ratajkowski. "She, of course, supported me. She's like, 'Do you need me to send you on a vacation? Tell me what you're going through.' And I, you know, talk to her about just being unhappy for a really long time and still grieving the death of my nephew... And she was like, 'Whatever you need, whatever you need.'"
When Roach made his announcement, theories on why the stylist abruptly retired circulated on social media. A video of Roach and Zendaya went viral on Twitter when users suggested that the stylist was upset over not having a seat beside the actress in the front row of a Louis Vuitton fashion show. In the video, Zendaya is seen pointing to a seat behind her, which users interpreted as her instructing Roach to sit there.
Users speculated that the incident was a sign of a rift between the two and some began to blame the actress for mistreating her fashion collaborator.
"The internet is cruel. It's really cruel. So people started to blame her for my retirement and that wasn't fair to her," Roach says of the backlash toward Zendaya. "And the things they were saying, of course, [aren't] true. So that spilled over to my suffering, she started to suffer too. And I didn't think that was fair. Because she has always protected me in this industry. And vice versa."
Roach defended the actress on Twitter as well, squashing those rumors by emphatically asserting that their relationship will remain strong.
"So y'all really think I'm breaking up with Z," he tweeted to his more than 33,000 followers on Twitter. "[W]e are forever!"
He followed that up with, "She’s my little sister and it’s real love not the fake industry love." A third tweet showed a GIF of two kids playing patty cake in a field and overlayed text that read, "ME & U MUST NEVA PART."
Roach went into further detail about his decision to retire with Ratajkowski, explaining that his priorities shifted after the death of his nephew two years ago. "I think that's when a shift for me started to happen... because I literally only got to really see my nephew, maybe four times in his three years because of work, and the guilt of that -- you didn't even get a chance to hold him enough," he laments.
Noting that he had "never been depressed" before that point in his life, Roach shares that his grief led to a strong bout that motivated him to make his family the top priority in his life. He says, "That is the priority to me, like I'm with them every chance I get. They live in Chicago. And so sometimes when I come to New York for work, I'll rent like a big stupid hotel suite and just let them just f**k it up... That is the priority for me, making sure that I'm around and I've given them something and I'm able to teach them stuff."
Roach says he still loves styling, recalling the work he's done with the likes of Zendaya, Kerry Washington, Issa Rae and Hunter Schafer and likening the experiences to "my drug." He shares, "I feel good because I know that I've played a part of them feeling that way. And that's what I love. And that part of the job I love."
But the stylist explains that he was deeply "unhappy" for weeks leading to his announcement. "From the outside looking at our world, it's like, it's perfect, right? But it's made to look perfect. That's the point. Because the perfection that we give is our way of entertaining everybody who's paying attention to us. But that's what it is, it's entertainment. And over the last, maybe two or three weeks, I realized f**k, I'm miserable," he admits.
He goes on about experiencing "crippling anxiety" as he realizes that he hasn't had a romantic relationship in the near-decade he's been working on his career and hasn't been able to connect with his friends who "don't live the same type of lifestyle."
"And my business is so big that it's all I do, it's all I have," he adds. "I've been miserable and unhappy for a long time. And I've been pretending to be perfect."
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