Zendaya’s Earrings Are Part of a Much Bigger Problem
The 3,000-year-old Iranian discs turned red-carpet jewelry are emblematic of a market that has spent decades quietly dismantling ancient objects for parts.
Zendaya faced backlash for wearing a pair of 3,000-year-old Iranian gold discs at a London photocall for Christopher Nolan's forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey earlier this month. The discs, mounted in 18-karat gold and diamonds, were recently made into earrings by jeweler Glenn Spiro as part of his Materials of the Old World collection, and subsequently acquired by London jewelry house Barron London, who stated that they are part of the company’s private collection and not for sale. However, they did not belong on the red carpet at all.
Described as a “voracious collector,” mesmerized by special artifacts “regardless of their provenance,” Spiro said in an interview about the collection, “You can wear something around your neck that dates back thousands of years but is still contemporary and cool.” One online review of Spiro’s collection perfectly captures the performative exoticism driving this kind of repurposing: “... fragments of forgotten empires are not merely displayed but reborn.”
The backlash on TikTok and Instagram was immediate and, notably, first came from archaeologists rather than fashion critics. They pointed out that presenting the objects as jewelry, rather than as artifacts in a display case, further facilitated their commodification and exotification. The Forensic Archive of Iran quickly launched a petition requesting transparency around the discs’ provenance.
Added to the controversy was Zendaya’s timing, wearing the earrings amid the United States and Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran, which have resulted in thousands of deaths and widespread destruction to invaluable cultural heritage. Critics situated the controversy within a longer pattern of Western indifference to the ethics of trading, handling and displaying West Asian heritage — what London-based writer Zirrar Ali described as celebrities, particularly in the Western world, being “largely deaf to questions of ethics and history when it comes to the Global South.”
But Zendaya's earrings are a viral instance of something the art market does constantly and almost always unquestioned: It takes archaeological, ethnographic, funerary and other cultural objects and physically alters them into jewelry, furniture, and decorative art, selling the transformation itself as added value.
