How Press Tours Became Hollywood’s Fiercest Fashion Battleground

Photographs: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Luca Guadagnino’s tennis tryst Challengers opened in theaters to $15 million this weekend, earning it the top spot at the domestic box office and the damp-browed adoration of style-minded critics and horny TikTok fans alike. But if the decision to hold the film’s planned release last fall due to the SAG strike is any indication, some of its box-office success is likely thanks to the tireless promotional efforts of its stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, who spent the last month flying all over the globe, putting on designer outfits (mostly by Jonathan Anderson, who costumed the film), and posing in front of various step-and-repeats.

Zendaya is, without question, the paragon of contemporary press tour style. She and her stylist of 13 years, Law Roach, pioneered a mode of “method dressing,” as Roach recently told Vogue. “The looks served as an extension of the wardrobe from the movie; it was intentional and purposeful.”

For the Challengers press tour, Zendaya and Roach leaned fully into a themed wardrobe, compiling dozens of designer outfits chosen for their to-the-letter sporty flair: a pleated Thom Browne gown adorned with tennis racket appliqués; a custom Celia Kritharioti minidress featuring a sequined rendering of Zendaya’s face on the movie poster; a glittering Loewe tennis dress and stilettos whose heels pierced life-size tennis balls. And many, many shades of fluorescent chartreuse.

Ahead of the first press event in Sydney, Roach described Zendaya’s debut look (a glittering green Loewe dress printed with a silhouette of a person wielding a racket) in a Vogue video as “our first unh into the world” of the film, an inaugural gesture to the Challengers cinematic universe. Zendaya, who also produced the film, even lightened her hair to a honey blonde for the occasion—a nod, she said, to the “old money” tennis lifestyle but also as a way to differentiate this from the global Dune: Part Two tour, which she’d wrapped just weeks prior.

This mode of hyper-precise, Easter-egg-laden “method dressing” has become the de facto dress code for big-ticket media tours over the last year. For Dune, Zendaya and her fellow young costars all dressed in a moody, techno-futuristic mood; afterwards, Timothée Chalamet—who also just ran a double-press-tour gauntlet, for Dune and Wonka—quickly pivoted to gourmand suits fit for a fictional chocolatier. The main red-carpet event of last year was Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling’s pastel-pink Barbie pageant, which Robbie recently parlayed into a Rizzoli coffee-table book. These ultra-literal red-carpet looks then go viral on Instagram, X, and TikTok, where rabbit-hole-prone users love to dissect the meanings and references behind any given outfit.

For busy actors and their similarly overworked stylists, a successful press tour—which can comprise red carpets, press junkets, photocalls, on-camera interviews, and meet-and-greets—generates personal buzz, too. Never have great gowns, beautiful gowns mattered more.

(This also happens in the music world, except instead of press tours we have the Swiftian notion of “eras,” wherein musicians style themselves around the theme of their new album: Think Billie Eilish bleaching her formerly green-rooted hair platinum for her grown-up sophomore album Happier Than Ever, Taylor Swift wearing celestial garments around Midnights, or Harry Styles wearing psychedelic fashion to promote his retro-pastiche Harry’s House.)

We’ve seen it play out in subtler ways on the menswear side, too, from Robert Pattinson’s hot-goth outfits for The Batman to Jacob Elordi’s classic-leading-man cosplay around Priscilla and Saltburn.

On the Challengers press tour, the movie’s male leads—O’Connor and Faist—were perhaps understandably daunted by the unfair task of having to pose next to Zendaya, for which Chalamet had already faced the internet’s wrath. Both mostly opted for Anderson’s designs (the duo also attended the Loewe runway show together back in January). O’Connor went for some kooky pulls, including a floppy-sleeved green-and-gray suit and a printed dress shirt modeled after his character’s JFK Jr.-inspired tee.

Faist, meanwhile, looked like he was trying his hardest to skirt the whole press-tour-style charade entirely by wearing relatively normal clothes—or, as WWD put it, “refusing to play the dress-up game.” At one event, posed next to Zendaya in a Jacquemus polo dress and O’Connor in a wonky knit sweater and leather pants, Faist wore…a white tee, a chambray shirt, and jeans.

On X, one fan joked: “Do you think Mike gets confused every time Josh and Z say they have to go change for the 5th time in a day but he only brought one outfit?”

Theme dressing aside, the more-is-more approach to media-tour fashion isn’t new. In 2015, actress Blake Lively—who is somewhat of an anomaly in Hollywood, in that she is known for self-styling—made headlines for wearing seven outfits in one day while promoting her film The Age of Adaline. Lively told People she’d been planning her press wardrobe for months, saying she had “selected easily over 500 looks from Style.com, various runways and even some past collections. I wound up calling in 256 outfits.” Wild for 2015 standards, but mild in a post-Law Roach world.

In 2017, Gabrielle Union’s stylist Thomas Christos Kikis spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the style circus-ification of media tours. “When you’re doing New York Fashion Week, you have to change looks, so it kind of conditions you. And you see what the response is when you do that, so you think, ‘Oh let’s just create a press tour like Fashion Week,” Kikis said. “It’s becoming more of an opportunity to showcase fashion and not just your movie or book or whatever you’re doing press about.”

Nearly a decade after Lively’s 256-outfit anomaly, the high-glitz, high-effort industry of “press tour style” is booming, particularly for labels clamoring to get their latest designs onto hot actors—some of whom have inked official brand partnerships or may receive compensation for wearing a certain label to a big event. And in a crowded media landscape, it’s never too early for fashion publicity.

When the first trailer for the forthcoming Wicked movie premiered during the Super Bowl in February, its stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande staged a tunnel-walk-style photoshoot wearing custom sequined Louis Vuitton jerseys in Elphaba green and Glinda pink, each emblazoned with the number 27—as in the film’s release date, November 27. But babe, that’s still nine months away! (The duo doubled down a few weeks later, wearing respective green and pink gowns to the 2024 Oscars.) On her Instagram story, Grande let slip a bit of incidental press-tour-style metacommentary: “I truly hope you are all ready for this press tour,” she wrote, indicating that her fashion wheels had already begun turning well ahead of Wicked’s standard promotional schedule.

In other words: Welcome to the press tour for the press tour.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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