The method dressing, the marble-skin makeup, the archival flexes, and the internet meltdown, decoded look by look. For the global press tour of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, where Zendaya plays Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategic warfare, she and her stylist Law Roach have turned the red carpet into a study of one mythological woman.
Through the tour’s European leg, two names quietly did the heavy lifting: makeup artist Ernesto Casillas and hairstylist Coree Moreno. Together with Roach, the man Zendaya calls her image architect, they have translated marble statues, sun-warmed skin, and braided crowns into looks of modern styling. Here is the full breakdown, beauty first, in the order she wore them.
Photo: Courtesy of Ernesto Casillas, Getty Images
New York: The Khaite Kickoff
She opened the tour quietly, spotted in Tribeca in a silky two-piece from Khaite‘s Resort 2027 collection, a blouse and skirt cinched with a wrapped leather belt strung with gold hardware. The shape nodded to the ancient Greek peplos, and she grounded it with gold Christian Louboutin sandals in place of her usual pumps.
Casillas kept the skin bronzed and lit from within, then framed it with bold, brushed-up brows, a soft smoked bronze eye, and a rosy lip. Moreno styled her hair into a curled bixie, tight and textured. It read as warm and lived-in, the opposite of stiff red-carpet polish, which is exactly why it worked as an opening statement.
Photo: Courtesy of Michael Stewart
London: A 3,000-Year-Old Earring
For the London photocall, Zendaya wore a custom ivory column dress by Jacquemus. From the front it was pure minimalist tailoring. From the back it dissolved into a draped, open silhouette with a built-in headscarf, a subtle Grecian flourish that Roach described as drawing on the essence of Athena.
The detail collectors will love: her earrings came from Barron London and date to the first millennium B.C., making them more than three thousand years old. Hair and makeup stayed soft and sunlit, letting the drapery and the headscarf carry the drama. This was the palate cleanser before the tour went fully maximal.
Photo: Getty Images
London: The Two-Dress Rule
The world premiere at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square is where the press tour became a cultural event, and Zendaya served two looks in one night. Look one was the closing gown from Schiaparelli‘s Fall 2026 Haute Couture show by Daniel Roseberry. Roach had it flown to London by private jet so Zendaya could give it its real debut. The dress paired a laced, marble-like breastplate molded to her torso with a beaded fringe skirt that faded from white to mirror-silver. She finished it with off-white pumps and a multi-strand Chopard diamond necklace.
Here the hair and makeup deserve as much credit as the couture. Moreno built a textured, Grecian half-up, half-down style with a loosely woven halo braid, worked in soft caramel tones with wispy, separated pieces and warm honey highlights. Working almost entirely in Charlotte Tilbury, Casillas prepped the skin with a vitamin C serum, a rich moisturizer, and a lip oil, then built a hydrating, natural-glow base. The eyes were the quiet showstopper: cream shadow sticks, with that final silvery shade pressed into the inner corners for a lit-from-inside gleam. His stated goal was simple, a bronzed, radiant, goddess-worthy glow with light, mesmerizing eyes.
Photo: Courtesy of Coree Moreno
Look two arrived because, as Roach put it on Instagram Stories, there is always a second dress. Zendaya changed into a Valentino design by Alessandro Michele: an embroidered green bodice built from overlapping leaf and petal motifs, a clear laurel reference, over a draped gray-green silk skirt with torso cut-outs. Diamond earrings and gray heels completed it. The switch to soft, mossy green after the silver-white couture showed range, and it kept the mythology going without repeating.
Photo: Getty images
Paris: The Mask That Broke The Internet
If the London premiere was about beauty as glow, the Paris photocall was about beauty as spectacle. Zendaya arrived in an archival white Givenchy Haute Couture look from Spring 1997, designed by Alexander McQueen during his tenure at the house. That collection, McQueen’s first for Givenchy, was titled The Search for the Golden Fleece and drew on Jason and the Argonauts, a myth that, like The Odyssey, features Athena herself.
The talking point was the headpiece: a pointed gold lace mask by milliner Philip Treacy that covered most of her face and left only her eyes and lips visible. Underneath it she wore a deep burgundy lip and gold and diamond jewelry, so the small amount of visible beauty had to carry real weight. The dark, glossy mouth against the metallic mask is the kind of styling choice that photographs like a painting.
The internet, predictably, could not agree on it. The look went viral within hours. Some called it museum-worthy. Others found it too theatrical, with playful comparisons ranging from the Eiffel Tower to an upside-down ice cream cone, and a running debate about whether her method dressing had crossed into gimmick territory. For a beauty-and-fashion story, that split is a gift. Polarizing looks are the ones people actually talk about.
Photo: Courtesy of Georgios Frangulis
Paris: The Blue-Eyeshadow Moment
The Paris premiere delivered the beauty look that beauty world is still dissecting. The gown was a custom Louis Vuitton by Nicolas Ghesquière, a two-tone white open-cut dress with a cropped bolero finished in the house’s frilled escargot lace. Louis Vuitton says it took close to eight hundred hours to make. She paired it with Christian Louboutin stilettos and Messika diamonds.
Casillas swapped the London bronze-and-silver formula for something cooler and dreamier, reaching for Prada Beauty‘s Dimensions eyeshadow palette in shade Pure 05. He washed a frosted, pastel cornflower blue across the lids, carried it past the crease and up toward the brow bone, then brightened the inner corners and lower lash line with a silver shimmer for an almost illuminated, wide-awake gaze. For hair, Moreno refined the Grecian idea into something quieter, a romantic low bun with a braided crown wrapping the head.
Photo: Courtesy of Ernesto Casillas, Getty Images
New York: Winged Finale
Our icon saved the boldest swing for last. For the New York premiere, Zendaya walked the carpet in a floor-length white gown by the French avant-garde label Matières Fécales, the creative partnership of Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran. The dress, named Ange Arc, closed the label’s Fall 2025 show in Paris, deliberately tattered feather train, a high side slit, and full angel wings rising from her back. The reference moved from statue to victory.
Commentators quickly tied it to the Nike of Samothrace, the winged Greek figure of triumph, which reframed Athena as a mythical guardian. She finished the look with long, floral-inspired Chopard diamond earrings and traded her signature pointed pumps for a sculptural, wedge-style heel. The beauty made the smartest move of the whole tour. It stepped back. After the frosted cornflower eye of Paris, France, Zendaya went soft and near-bare for New York, a natural, understated face that let the wings do all the talking. The real story lived in the hair: a loose, tousled fishtail braid trailing down her back with pieces left out to frame her face.
Photo: Getty Images
There is a bonus here for the piece, because she treated the full New York day as a mini-tour of its own. Earlier, leaving her hotel, she wore an antique-gold pleated silk chiffon Grecian gown from Pamella Roland‘s Fall 2026 collection. The day before, on July 13, she stepped out in a plunging, gold-embellished white Alberta Ferretti dress from Spring 2008, styled with Sophia Webster gladiator heels and her natural curls in a soft bob.
Photo: Getty Images
