To accomplish that goal, Zendaya and Roach scouted a house with a large circular driveway, complete with a gurgling fountain, and a grand entrance flanked by white marble columns. The way change happens is when people can see wealth and grandeur in a way that they are not used to seeing it.” “Doing a Slim Aarons shoot, but with Black actors,” Roach said later. “That life, but reimagined for now, with the look of then,” she explained as Roach nodded. Her goal for this W shoot was to replace the conventional idea of white society in Aarons’s picture with the more modern concept of a Black couple who live in a similarly grand house with an equally alluring swimming pool. “That’s the mood I want,” Zendaya, bundled up in a white terrycloth robe, said definitively. They had studied other well-known images on Roach’s phone-Elvis with a sultry Priscilla Presley sitting on his lap the French crooner and sex symbol Serge Gainsbourg nuzzling Jane Birkin, his young girlfriend an elaborately coiffed model in a floral gown surveying the grounds of the Hôtel du Cap on the French Riviera-but they always returned to Aarons’s portrayal of Guest.
Next to Zendaya was Law Roach, her longtime stylist and collaborator, who was wearing a denim Prada trenchcoat and a baseball cap that read respect the sexy. Guest, a very tan, very blonde socialite who became, in that iconic image by Slim Aarons, the personification of wealth, status, and privilege. On a bright, beautiful day, at a mansion in Beverly Hills, Zendaya, the 24-year-old actress and producer, was looking at a photo of an elegant 1950s beauty in classic resortwear standing by a vast, vaguely Grecian swimming pool.