Zendaya's Best Red Carpet Fashion of 2024 Proves She's Celebrity Style's MVP

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear Zendaya's name? Is it her history-making Emmy awards for her performance on Euphoria, or her turn on Arrakis as the rebel princess Chani in Dune: Part Two? What about her coordinating couple outfits with boyfriend (and Spiderman costar) Tom Holland? Well, if you paid any attention to 2024's red carpets, you associate "Zendaya" with "best-dressed" before anything else.

Zendaya's best red carpet fashion of 2024 cast her as more than a style icon or a devout student of runway history; she's a style chameleon. She made more than 50 red carpet appearances covered by Marie Claire editors this year—and she was readers' most-viewed celebrity when we did. She and image architect Law Roach wrote the book on smart method dressing, dipping into revered runway collections and crafting custom Loewe, Louis Vuitton, and Bottega Veneta pieces (among others) to reference her roles in the sci-fi epic Dune: Part Two and the tennis throuple drama Challengers. She co-chaired the 2024 Met Gala; she got a gold medal in street style at the Paris Olympics. Across every single appearance, her outfit was the most highly anticipated by a mile.

Zendaya's best red carpet fashion stood out for its sheer fearlessness. Some A-listers get comfortable in a sequin peplum gown or a skintight naked dress and never look back. Zendaya, meanwhile, kept viewers on their toes while pushing her own boundaries. From afar, she seemed to embrace glitchy Givenchy cyborg suits (for Dune), tennis-ball greens and Wimbledon whites by Loewe, Thom Browne, and Calvin Klein (for Challengers) and Shakespearean Vivienne Westwood gowns (for just a night out in London) with equal enthusiasm. She even wore a metal—real metal!—cyborg suit from Mugler, just to show her dedication to Dune's futuristic aesthetic.

Even if back-to-back appearances came with pieces designed by the same house, they never looked exactly the same. Her looks varied in shape, texture, and associated glam, but she made the head-to-toe commitment to each, switching out her manicure or dyeing her hair to best accentuate the dress (or suit). She also took the time to champion smaller designers alongside LVMH-backed names, such as the experimental Torishéju Dumi or the Greek couture house Celia Kritharoti.

It's a testament to her red carpet prowess that no one detects the red carpet anxiety she often gets beneath all the wigs, makeup, and gravity-defying dresses. She copped to feeling hesitation toward some looks in her Vanity Fair cover story interview this fall. But ultimately, she said, these outfits are a form of armor and a form of getting into character; she can't help but commit to the bit. "I also think that fashion, in many ways, is a tool for me. I consider myself a shyer person, which I guess you wouldn’t quite realize from the crazy, sometimes ridiculous things that I wear," she said.

Objectively, anyone wearing a suit made of metal or a dress that's nearly a century old is going to get headlines. But Zendaya and Roach also stood out among a recent archival fashion surge because they do their research. The pieces they pick out derive from collections with aesthetic ties to the event they're attending or the project Zendaya is promoting. And, the pair supports vintage collectors in the process. "We don't borrow," Roach famously told Vogue during the Dune promotional cycle, "we buy."

These choices feel even more authentic to Zendaya considering that they aren't limited to a single press tour or red carpet. Co-chairing the 2024 Met Gala—a few months after the Dune and Challengers frenzies—Zendaya wore several archival looks befitting the "Garden of Time" theme. Before she even stepped on the museum steps wearing Maison Margiela Artisanal by John Galliano (which was itself inspired by a 1999 Dior piece) she was dropping hints about her look in a vintage floral pre-Met Gala John Galliano dress. She followed up her first dress with a second Galliano design, dated to his tenure at Givenchy during the mid-1990s.

Later in the year, Z paid homage to Cher in a vintage Bob Mackie naked dress circa 2001. The shimmering champagne gown, and its white leather overcoat, were nods to a Cher Show performance from the 1970s. Each of these fashion moments came with hair and makeup to emphasize the dress—and the original context it was worn in.

No one can accuse a Zendaya look's history of overshadowing the look itself. Nothing the actress wears ever wears her, whether it's glittering Armani Privé for the 2024 Oscars or off-the-runway Burberry for a promotional appearance. She and Roach have the range to go subdued or over-the-top, colorful or stark black-and-white, decades-old vintage or brand-new custom. Each distinct look works because it achieves the same end—showcasing Zendaya's leading-lady poise and fashion appreciation—through different means.

Designers have taken notice beyond opening their archives for Roach and Zendaya to raid as much as they please. After years of dedicated commitment to wearing Christian Louboutin's "So Kate" heels, the label is releasing a "Miss Z" pump in Zendaya's honor next year. Louis Vuitton has recently tapped Z to be its ambassador, dressing her for Paris Fashion Week (her one and only front row this past season), tapping her for a long-awaited, early-aughts-coded collab campaign with Takashi Murakami, and even creating bespoke burgundy outfits for her date nights with Tom Holland. When Z likes a house, she wears it frequently and authentically to her personal style. That kind of genuine brand loyalty feels rare while other celebs fleetingly buy into the loud luxury trend.

Seven years ago, when Zendaya was only 21, she appeared on Marie Claire's September 2018 cover in conversation with Janet Mock. She discussed how shaping her style with Roach helped her shape her professional identity at a critical time in her career: the years of early adulthood as she transitioned from child star to capital-A actress. "I wanted to create who I was as a person outside of my Disney character. Fashion helped with that," she said. "My stylist, Law Roach, and I created a world beyond what I was known as through clothes."

No one thinks "former Disney star" when they think of Zendaya now. She's been in too many other projects, and turned too many advanced looks, to be left with only that epithet. Whether audiences associate her most with Tashi Duncan, Chani of Arrakis, Euphoria's Rue Bennett, or the MJ to Tom Holland's Spiderman, they definitely know her as red carpet fashion's MVP now.