Photo via the Hollywood Reporter.
Celebrity stylist Law Roach announced his retirement last week, stunning the fashion industry at large as he had been—quoting The Cut’s Lindsay Peoples—at the top of his game. In Roach’s hands, clothes aren’t just fabric; they become fable, creating myth of the mortals who wear them. Clients become bigger than just themselves under his styling. Famously, Roach worked with Zendaya when she was just a newcomer on the scene. It’s fashion, not talent, that determines It Girls and Roach is a master at his craftsmanship.
His ascend into the top tiers of Hollywood is one of the books. At the time of his retirement, Roach had styled just about every household name you can think of: Anya Taylor Joy, Megan Thee Stallion, Hunter Schafer, Kerry Washington, Ariana Grande, and more. His looks regularly topped “Best Dressed” lists, but the prestigious accolades weren’t telling us—the witnesses to his art—that we didn’t already know: Law Roach is in a league of his own.
Celebrity fashion exists in the thin overlap of storytelling and commerce. You can put designer on a girl, but you cannot make her into a muse. What is admirable about Roach’s work is that his relationship with fashion is a spiritual one (as he told The Cut). But as we’ve seen throughout history, the churches that house us are not always judicious nor merciful. Such is the case with Roach, who gave an in-depth interview on his decision to leave the institution that bled him dry.
I shared the interview with to every person of color—whether they worked in the creative field or not—I knew. Roach’s candidness about his time as a stylist put a brutal truth to print that we’ve all been thinking: we have all failed to reform white institutions. And it’s time we are all done trying.
In my more idealistic youth, I was a political science major at university. I got an internship at the Democratic National Party the summer of 2018 despite my reservations at propping Hilary “War Hawk” Clinton up. In my early 20s, I bought into the myth that we can change the system from the inside. It’s not lost on me now that I am an East Asian female and have always benefitted from respectability politics. White people have never accepted me into their fold, but they allowed me to exist at their periphery under the guise that I was “one of the good ones.”
I was progressive, but not radical. I was vague in my activism then, never particularly calling out anyone as the oppressor, but merely stating that racism exists and we should all just vote. Green as I was, I genuinely believed that we could work together to dismantle systemic horrors through joined hands. I ended up quitting that internship because my supervisor had drunkenly berated me, but some persistent part of me still believed that institutions like the DNC were the vehicle to change.
It wasn’t until the beginning of 2021 and the following months that a more insidious truth begun to reveal itself. That even though industries, companies, and individuals championed ideas of diversity and inclusivity, they wanted it in the abstract. They wanted me (being the operative token POC) to move the mountain, so long as they can continue sitting at the top.
The summer of 2020, I ran social media for a tech start-up that masqueraded itself as a mental health hotline. They were so abrasive towards their employees—particularly their employees of color—that the Verge dedicated an entire feature to their wrongs. It was my first job in corporate world and the months prior to me leaving, I had pushed and pushed for them to recognize systemic racism as a leading cause of depression, anxiety, and PSTD. My then-manager sent a Slack (that I won’t be reposting here, but you can find in the article) that more or less said, “Well, who cares?”
I think about that job often. Despite how traumatizing it had been, I don’t necessarily regret it in the sense that it pulled the wool from my eyes. Institutions have power for a reason—and they get it from systems of whiteness. To keep that power, they don’t actually want to dismantle these structures of power. In his interview, Roach talks about it’s rare for a man in his position—a Black man, who didn’t have entry-level jobs in the celebrity styling world—to be where he is.
Roach was blunt in why. The gatekeepers of that world, the agents and managers and publicists, have intentionally made it so. I wonder how much of a relief it must be to name racism outright when most of us have been taught to swallow it. I think to my own career and how much of it has been in service to institutions of whiteness under the guise that they can be reformed. I wonder how much of it had truly made a difference after I left, or even during.
I imagine my past self tossing a pebble in a lake, watching as it hit the surface. But you cannot change water with a ripple. You cannot change nature from its ways.
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I spent an afternoon in my friend Jordan’s backyard. She said something along the lines of not wanting to spend her career making white woman richer. I remember feeling both seen and defensive: I have only ever worked under white women. Under them, there is a falsifying sense of security. There is the glossy lie of sisterhood. I was doing consulting work for a now-despised mega-influencer then; she had gotten backlash for abusing her white privilege and had the idea to outsource her diversity efforts to me. The work she was doing was taking silenced videos of me talking about racism on Zoom and posting it to her Instagram story.
In my acting conservatory (which ran Monday-Friday, four hours a day), I struggled with showing up to class and going on as normal when anti-Asian hate crimes tripled that year. After the Atlanta Spa Shooting, the studio—spearheaded by their only Asian employee—decided to create a support group for their students of color. I didn’t go. I asked them why there needed to be a separate space for us to process our feelings, when the issue was the white and instructors students being oblivious about race.
Why is the onus on us, again and again, to bend and cater when the issue is—and always has been—the white powers that be?
Why, in order for progress to be made, does the burden of change fall on the people who suffers the most under whiteness?
This award season was bleak to me, despite Everything Everywhere All At Once sweeping major categories. I wrote an op-ed for Teen Vogue on how distressing it is to hear Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, the Daniels, etc give speech after speech about how they preserved. Quan almost quit acting because no one would give him a job. He still lives in fear that history will repeat itself. Their triumph is bittersweet because it’s not a story about how they conquered; it’s a history lesson in how Hollywood has actively tried to erase us.
“We feel like to be successful, we have to suffer,” Roach said to The Cut. For the Yeohs and Quans of the world to get their moment in the sun, they must first have to be dismissed, belittled, excluded, and tormented. I am tired of these narratives; I no longer want to romanticize this idea that our calling is in the overcoming. I want institutions like Hollywood, like the fashion world, like the United States of America, to stop clapping for our resilience and instead just move out of the way for a change.
I used to worry more about being palatable. The immigrant nature in me still craves acceptance, or at least the illusion of it. Even when I write about race, there’s a part of my brain that fears how powerful white people in my network will react. But the centering of their feelings is the very status quo that I want to dismantle. Roach is leaving styling because there was no one to protect him (a sentiment that breaks my heart). For all his contributions, he was left vulnerable against these systems of whiteness and those who safeguard it.
And that in itself is the hardest, most liberating truth: institutions will not free us.
In 2023, I made a resolution to give up this idea of reformation. I do not care to be on the inside where power is—I have been in those rooms and it is four bleak walls, no different than a prison. At 26, I do not dream of being Atlas with his mountain on his back, holding the sky from falling. Instead, I will dedicate my labor to building new land and creating a village with the people I love, who have never been prioritized under the old world order. Like Roach, I am no longer stretching myself to meet my oppressors at their half-way point of their guilt and humanity.
If the mountain wants to move, it will have to come to me.