Hollywood star Zendaya came under fire for wearing 3,000-year-old Iranian gold artefacts as earrings at a London photocall for Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey, which critics called a misappropriation of one of the ancient world's most significant collections of objects.
The earrings — gold disc medallions dating to the first millennium BCE and attributed to the Ziwiyeh hoard, a collection discovered in northwest Iran in the late 1940s — were remounted with diamonds and 18-karat gold by London jeweller Glenn Spiro as part of his Materials of the Old World series. They are owned by Barron London, a Mayfair-based gallery and art collection.
"You can wear something around your neck that dates back thousands of years but is still contemporary and cool," Spiro told Galerie magazine in 2025.
Zendaya wore them at a photocall promoting the film, in which she plays the goddess Athena.
The backlash from experts and social media users was swift. An Instagram creator known as Dr Z the Archaeologist, with around 43,000 followers, was among the first to draw attention to the provenance issue, stating that "black market antiquities are super uncool."
