Every awards-and-premiere cycle needs its ‘look of the tour’, and this summer, Zendaya was locking that title down early. At The Odyssey's London premiere, Zendaya paired a custom Jacquemus outfit with a striking set of gold discs at her ears. They read as bold, architectural, unmistakably ‘of the moment’. Off camera, internet sleuths quickly established they were anything but modern.
The discs are reportedly gold sun-motif plaques dating back roughly 2,000 to 3,000 years, to the first millennium BCE, reset into contemporary earrings with 18-karat gold and diamonds by jeweller Glenn Spiro, as part of a collection built around historic materials. They were loaned out by Barron London, a dealer specialising in antique jewellery, and are believed to trace back to the Ziwiye Treasure, a cache of Iranian gold and silver artefacts unearthed in the village of Ziwiye in the late 1940s.
The Ziwiye find wasn’t a controlled archaeological excavation — historians describe it as having been looted from the site and scattered across private and museum collections worldwide, with much of its documented provenance murky at best.
Archaeologists and commentators piled on quickly, some framing the choice as reflecting outdated, Orientalist attitudes toward the cultural property of the Global South. Fans, for their part, split down the middle — some defending Zendaya as simply wearing what stylist Law Roach put in front of her, others arguing that at her level of fame, “I didn't know” isn’t much of a shield.
It also didn't help that the earrings dropped into headlines already primed for scrutiny, given the same press tour saw Roach fly by private jet from London to Paris purely to secure the Schiaparelli gown fresh off the runway.
Barron London addressed the backlash directly. They welcomed open conversation about where the pieces came from, how they’d been preserved, and the craftsmanship behind them. That’s a diplomatic way of acknowledging the discourse without conceding wrongdoing. Whether that response satisfies critics calling for repatriation to Iran remains to be seen; some reports suggest Iranian cultural authorities are now looking into how artefacts from a protected national find ended up on a Hollywood red carpet in the first place.
If this all feels familiar, it should. Fashion has done this before: think back to Kim Kardashian's 2022 Met Gala moment in Marilyn Monroe's fragile, decades-old Happy Birthday, Mr. President gown, which conservators warned should never have left a climate-controlled archive, let alone been worn on a body other than Monroe’s. The through-line is the same — irreplaceable pieces of history treated as accessories, with institutions and dealers happy to lend them out for the exposure.
Ironically, the controversy is doing exactly what great method dressing is supposed to do: getting people to think harder about the story. The Odyssey itself has already stirred debate over historical accuracy in its retelling of Homer's epic. Now its promotional trail has stumbled into a real-world echo of the same questions — who gets to hold onto history, who gets to display it, and who gets to profit from it along the way.
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