Netflix ‘Malcolm & Marie’ stars Zendaya and John David Washington cover the March 2021 issue of W Magazine. Law Roach and Samantha McMillen style the couple in designs from Gucci, Miu Miu, Prada, Valentino and more. Photographer Nadine Ijewere captures the couple in an Old Hollywood setting — planned out in every detail by Zendaya and her team. It’s clear who ran the creative direction in this delicious set of images.

Lynn Hirschberg conducts the interview and we connect with her at W Magazine.

Zendaya was on a mission in the W Magazine shoot. The star and her posse studied numerous famous images, writes Hirschberg: Elvis with Priscilla Presley sitting on his lap; French icon Serge Gainsbourg with French icon Jane Birkin; an “unnamed .elaborately coiffed model in a floral gown surveying the grounds of the Hôtel du Cap on the French Riviera”.

It was a famous image by Slim Aarons of CZ Guest that captured Zendaya’s attention. The very blonde socialite dressed in classic resortwear, standing next to a “vaguely” Grecian swimming pool grabbed Zendaya’s mental focus and refused to let go. Zendaya and Washington would drive a stake in the ground for Black success , wealth and a pedigreed, luxury life.

“That’s the mood I want,” Zendaya, bundled up in a white terrycloth robe, said definitively. Her goal for this W shoot was to replace the conventional idea of white society in Aarons’s picture with the more modern concept of a Black couple who live in a similarly grand house with an equally alluring swimming pool. “That life, but reimagined for now, with the look of then,” she explained as Roach nodded. “Doing a Slim Aarons shoot, but with Black actors,” Roach said later. “The visuals matter. The way change happens is when people can see wealth and grandeur in a way that they are not used to seeing it.”

Photographer Nadine Ijewere surely agrees that in the case of of Zendaya and John David Washington, it’s mission accomplished for ‘Their Place in the Sun’.