Two years ago, French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus sketched a white dress with Zendaya in mind. “Today, seeing her in that garment feels surreal,” he writes, “happy,” on his Instagram profile alongside a photograph of the actress during the London première of Dune: Part Two. Two years might seem like an eternity to bring a dress to life. But the timeframe (and the designer’s enthusiasm) are immediately dwarfed when the earrings you decide to debut it with are over 3,000 years old.
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When Zendaya appeared in London two weeks ago to present Dune: Part Two, Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation inspired by the epic poem attributed to Homer, the focus inevitably shifted to her earrings: two original gold discs dated between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, later mounted on a contemporary 22-carat gold structure by the British firm Barron London. How an antiquity of almost three millennia ended up hanging from the lobes of the 2026 star for a red carpet outfit is a story that blends a stylist’s intuition with an extraordinary flair for marketing, centuries of looting, a phenomenon known as method dressing, geopolitical tensions, and a few ethical questions.
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Behind the choice of earrings (and the dress) is Law Roach, the celebrity stylist responsible for turning every public appearance by Zendaya into an extension of her films’ visual universe. It’s a strategy known as method dressing: during promotion, the actor or actress wears garments that evoke the aesthetic, colors, symbols, or even the iconography of their character. Roach is an artist at this: he already did it by dressing Zendaya herself in archival pieces during the Dune: Part Two tour, such as when he put her in a 1995 Thierry Mugler ‘vintage’ armor. This strategy (another great architect is stylist Andrew Mukamal, who turned every Margot Robbie appearance into a Barbie recreation during the promotion of Greta Gerwig’s film) is a very recent trend. In fact, if we travel to classic Hollywood, we’ll see that the priority was always to project the star’s image rather than prolonging the character’s illusion off-screen. Take the case of Elizabeth Taylor presenting Cleopatra in 1963: she didn’t wear gold braids or any falcon-shaped crown, probably because Roach hadn’t been born yet.
Looting and status
According to National Geographic, the discs belonged to the so-called Ziwiye treasure, a collection of gold, silver, and ivory pieces discovered near Saqqez, in northwestern Iran, in the late 1940s. The find was never excavated by archaeologists: the objects were extracted, fragmented, and sold almost immediately, before the site could be documented. This loss of context means that researchers still don’t know precisely how the pieces were arranged, what their exact function was, or even if they all belonged to the same set. Over time, the treasure was dispersed among private collections and institutions such as the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And that’s how British jeweler Glenn Spiro incorporated these two discs into a contemporary design within his Materials of the Old World collection, which Barron London later acquired and has now lent for Zendaya to wear during the film’s promotion.
Amidst the controversy, Barron London was quick to explain to CNN that the ancient discs are held by a “simple and non-invasive” claw system, designed to prevent any alteration of the original pieces. The firm also defended that cultural heritage “inspires important conversations” and expressed hope that these earrings would serve as a reminder of Iran’s artistic, cultural, and historical legacy.
Specialists were quick to speak out. One of the first was archaeologist and popularizer Annelise Baer. In a video published on Instagram, she confesses to being “obsessed” with the pieces: “They are incredible.” She explains that those discs were probably never earrings, but rather ornaments sewn onto a ceremonial garment, and recalls that the rosette or sunburst motif was very common in the ancient Near East. “Royalty and nobility loved striking jewelry: large earrings, necklaces, bracelets…”. For Baer, these discs are a magnificent example of that tradition and are part of an increasingly visible trend of recovering ancient jewelry as inspiration in contemporary fashion.
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The enormous impact of the video led her to publish a second, this time much more reflective. Baer, whose doctoral thesis precisely studied how the perception of archaeological objects changes when they are removed from their original context, acknowledged that these pieces “were very probably looted.” But her interest lay in another question: “Would you care so much about these objects if you hadn’t seen them turned into gold earrings at a film premiere and they were simply inside a display case at the British Museum?” For the archaeologist, the real experiment consists of observing how our relationship with an object changes when it moves from the museum to the red carpet. “Instead of being a static object in a display case, these earrings have become the starting point for a much broader conversation about the ethics of owning antiquities and about archaeological looting over the last two hundred years.” And she concludes by posing another question to the viewer: “We know from their design that they were created as objects of prestige. That is precisely what they still are today. But how does your perception change when you see them at a première instead of in a museum? Is it better? Is it worse? That’s what the debate is about.”
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The reply was not long in coming. The archaeologist and popularizer known as Dr. Z (@dr.archaeology) opens her video bluntly: “To me, this is disgusting.” Although she makes it clear that she does not intend to personally attack Baer, she flatly rejects celebrating this type of initiative. “I’m also obsessed, but as an archaeologist, what I need is to see much less of this.”
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Her main objection is the provenance of the discs, the valuable “provenance” in Archaeology. “We know absolutely nothing about their provenance,” she recalled, criticizing that they are part of the collection of London jeweler Glenn Spiro, who uses ancient artifacts from North Africa, the Near East, and West Africa without making public how they were acquired. She is also not convinced by the narrative with which the designer presents his collection, inspired – according to his own words – by “treasure hunting” and the exoticism of distant lands. “That, of course, doesn’t convince me.”
“The issue is not about displaying ancient art; it’s about fetishizing the past.” In her opinion, these objects cease to be heritage to become a commodity that functions as a status symbol. “This is about signaling social class,” she states, before warning that glorifying this type of piece contributes to fueling the international antiquities market, a business that, she reminds us, continues to incentivize the looting of sites and harm originating communities. The truth is that Zendaya’s 3,000-year-old earrings are the latest gesture of a very contemporary snobbery among celebrities: from Kim Kardashian wearing Marilyn Monroe’s iconic crystal dress (which belongs to a museum, and which, apparently, she damaged) to countless actresses and celebrities eager to wear “archival” pieces, the act of managing to wear a “vintage” piece places you in a highly desired position. The podium of “those who can” and “those who know.”
In her criticism, Dr. Z also makes an interesting political observation: if, as everything suggests, these discs come from Iran, she finds it particularly uncomfortable that they end up adorning “the ears of an American actress from a country that has just bombed Iran.”
The debate, in reality, transcends Zendaya. From a legal point of view, a piece being three thousand years old does not necessarily mean it must be in a museum. Many antiquities left their countries of origin before the 1970 UNESCO Convention, and if their chain of ownership is documented, they can remain in private hands, be sold, or lent for exhibitions and even public events.
The question, as almost always, is more ethical than legal. And perhaps therein lies the true merit – or the true problem – of those earrings. Because, a week later, everyone is still talking about two small gold discs that survived three thousand years and that, for the first time in a long time, have made millions of people wonder if we have the right to wear a piece of history just for the likes.
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