By Marion Fasel for Air Mail
*This is an excerpt of my story published on AirMail.
August 5, 2026
When a star borrows jewelry to wear on a red carpet, the information about it is typically announced in a simple press release issued by the jeweler or their publicity firm. On July 24, however, a major credit quickly gave way to a tangled web of confusion.
It all started at 10:53 A.M., when Chopard, the Swiss jeweler and watchmaker, sent out a press release featuring two pictures of Zendaya at the Shanghai premiere of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, alongside a description of the massive diamond-and-19-carat-yellow-sapphire spider brooch the actress wore pinned to the hip of her archival Atelier Versace gown from spring 2016. There were also details about the ring she wore on her right hand. (The Rolex diamond watch on Zendaya’s wrist was, of course, not listed in Chopard’s missive.)
Among the finery, the spider brooch was a spectacular placement even for Chopard, a brand that has racked up innumerable celebrity credits over the years. Just in the last few months, Beyoncé, Madonna, and Jennifer Lopez have worn pieces from the jeweler, and the firm is also an official partner and the exclusive jeweler of the Cannes Film Festival—Caroline Scheufele, Chopard’s co-owner, co-president, and artistic director, and her team have swooped into the South of France for decades with a treasury of jewels to lend luminaries during the fortnight of festivities.
Still, Zendaya’s red-carpet appearances, orchestrated with her image architect Law Roach—a media personality known among the fashion flock for his encyclopedic knowledge as well as for being a highly opinionated judge on Project Runway—are different. They often go viral like very little else in the celebrity sphere, and her look in Shanghai did just that. When Chopard released the news about the spider brooch, which marked at least the third time the star had worn the house’s pieces in the last month, the jeweler entered the global media frenzy, from legacy publications to the network of social-media powerhouses with hundreds of thousands of followers who cover red-carpet fashion.
When the press release landed in my in-box, I did have an, er, spidey sense that something was off. The Chopard arachnid looked hauntingly similar to a diamond-and-kunzite spider brooch made in the 1990s by the American jeweler David Webb, which was sold at Christie’s in New York on October 20, 2015. I happen to have attended the preview of that sale and took a number of pictures of the four-and-a-half-inch-wide jewel, which smashed the auction house’s $50,000 high estimate, selling for $77,500 to an anonymous buyer. Comparing my pictures from that time to the Zendaya ones, it looked like the same exact brooch, except the center stone was a yellow sapphire instead of a kunzite, and there were no baguettes on the pavé-set diamond abdomen.
Then, at 5:33 P.M. that same day, David Webb issued their own press release, stating the spider brooch was theirs. It included photos of Zendaya and receipts, so to speak, in the form of a sketch of the original 1990s design proving authorship. The jeweler also posted the visuals and supporting information on Instagram, about an hour before their press release went out.
This update set off a firestorm among green-screen fashion critics on social media. No one could explain for certain quite how it happened, but there were theories. The popular Instagram account @ideservecouture, manned by Hanan Besovic and counting 670,000 followers, claimed that the David Webb jewel came from Caroline Scheufele’s personal collection, and that she had lent it to Zendaya. In a video, Besovic guessed that this was why Law Roach had tagged Scheufele’s personal Instagram account, as well as Chopard, in his own Instagram story about the brooch. (After being informed by FKA, David Webb’s publicity agency, that the jewel did not belong to Scheufele, Besovic issued a correction to the caption of his video.) Jack Savoie of @thesavoiedaily, an Instagram account with 328,000 followers, meanwhile, wondered if the spider was “an estate Chopard piece that was at David Webb or vice versa.”
In the Vanity Fair newsletter Fit Check, José Criales-Unzueta theorized that Roach had simply made a mistake tagging Chopard on his Instagram story, stating: “This kind of credit mishap happens, dare I say, more often than any of us in fashion would like, particularly with the number of samples from many different brands that stylists as prolific as Roach are handling on a daily basis.”
A representative of Law Roach did not respond to our request for comment, but Roach did release a YouTube video about Zendaya’s Spider-Man red-carpet looks on August 2 in which he obliquely addresses the “infamous spider brooch” controversy, saying: “I mean, like, do you really think somebody like me would have made a mistake and misspoken about where I got a piece of jewelry from? Come on, y’all. Grow up.”
So far, a straightforward answer to how two legendary jewelers could both lay claim to such an iconic design has yet to materialize. There is, however, evidence that suggests Roach got the brooch from Chopard…
The rest of this story can be found on Air Mail
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Great story! So well-written and engaging!