“One day you’re a kid and you’re at the pub with your friends, and then the next day you’re Spider-Man,” Zendaya told British Vogue in 2024, reflecting on the speed with which her then-boyfriend Tom Holland’s life changed after the pair met on the set of Spider-Man: Homecoming back in 2016. “We were both very, very young, but my career was already kind of going, and his changed overnight,” she added. “He handled it really beautifully.”
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Nearly a decade on, Zendaya and Tom occupy a unique place in the celebrity firmament: among Hollywood’s most visible couples, yet one of its most guarded and unknowable. Which is perhaps why their appearance at the Spider-Man: Brand New Day photo call in Madrid this afternoon – their first red-carpet appearance together since October 2024, and their first as husband and wife – felt momentous beyond the usual promotional fanfare of two romantic leads posing for the cameras. It was a case of life imitating art (if Marvel counts as art?) imitating life.
And both of them seemed to dress with their new spouse in mind. Tom wore black Jacquemus tailoring with a flash of a Spider-Man-red shirt beneath, while Zendaya opted for a black Christopher Cowan minidress paired with Christian Louboutin heels whose scarlet soles nodded to the same palette. The “method dressing” that Zendaya and her longtime collaborator, Law Roach, helped to institutionalise on the red carpet was there, too – albeit with a lighter touch: the asymmetrical fringe of her LBD redolent of a hundred fast-moving spider legs in motion.
