“Let the games begin…” Law Roach earlier this week captioned an Instagram post, featuring client and confidante Zendaya in an Olympics-inspired romper plucked from Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s spring/summer 2008 collection. For those of us who experienced Roach’s woefully underreported approach to “method dressing” throughout the Dune: Part Two and Challengers press tours earlier in 2024, the caption should have read: “Let the games continue and continue and continue…”
The actress was later photographed signing autographs outside the Hôtel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde, dressed not as a performer in Paris’s opening Thomas Jolly-helmed spectacle, but as a 27-year-old woman who probably knows that Nuovo is the best place to find, say, vintage Miss Sixty in Paris. She wore a simple vest top—worn a la française, with no bra_Louis Vuitton’s Diane shoulder bag, The Row’s Mary-Jane ballerinas, and an asymmetric skirt that cut across the most “unflattering” point of her shins.
This sort of bookish skirt length should now be considered a good thing. At the tail end of 2023, British Vogue editor Joy Montgomery christened the silhouette an underdog style on the rise, having observed its rehabilitation via Miu Miu, 16Arlington, Gucci, and Saint Laurent’s recent collections. She cast Andy Sachs as its poster girl—because that infamous cerulean-blue-jumper-and-check-skirt outfit was quite Prada, no?—but could just as feasibly have chosen Zendaya, fashion’s off-duty Olympian.
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
