Zendaya drew criticism earlier this month after wearing a pair of 3,000-year-old Iranian gold discs at a London photocall for Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of The Odyssey. The discs, set in 18-karat gold and diamonds, were recently turned into earrings by jeweler Glenn Spiro for his Materials of the Old World collection and later acquired by London jewelry house Barron London, which said they are part of its private collection and not for sale. But many argued they should never have appeared on the red carpet in the first place.
Spiro, described as a “voracious collector” captivated by rare artifacts “regardless of their provenance,” 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 the collection neatly sums up the kind of performative exoticism at work here: “… fragments of forgotten empires are not merely displayed but reborn.”
The response on TikTok and Instagram was swift and, notably, began with archaeologists rather than fashion commentators. They argued that presenting the objects as jewelry rather than leaving them as artifacts in a display case further encouraged their commodification and exotification. The Forensic Archive of Iran soon launched a petition demanding transparency about the discs’ provenance.
The controversy was sharpened by Zendaya’s timing, with the earrings worn amid the United States and Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran, which have caused thousands of deaths and widespread damage to invaluable cultural heritage. Critics placed the backlash within a broader pattern of Western indifference to the ethics of trading, handling, and displaying Middle Eastern heritage — what London-based writer Zirrar Ali described as celebrities, especially in the Western world, being “largely deaf to questions of ethics and history when it comes to the Global South.”
More broadly, the episode highlights a practice that the art market performs constantly and with little scrutiny: taking archaeological, ethnographic, funerary, and other cultural objects and physically altering them into jewelry, furniture, and decorative art, while marketing the transformation itself as added value. Roman, Egyptian, Phoenician, and Islamic beads are routinely restrung into modern necklaces and bracelets, and archaeological textile fragments, detached architectural reliefs, ethnographic carvings, ritual and sacred objects, and other finite cultural resources are regularly recast as luxury décor. When the change is sold as craftsmanship, the object’s earlier history is often obscured, while drilling, cutting, mounting, painting, and setting make the process irreversible.
Barron London describes the earrings as “a pair of Ziwiye gold medallion plaques, circa 1st millennium BC Iran.” That attribution links them to the “Ziwiye” treasure, a hoard of gold, silver, and ivory objects reportedly found by local villagers in northwestern Iran (Kurdistan) in 1947. The site was looted before any archaeological excavation could take place, and while objects attributed to the find are now in numerous museum collections, some scholars have questioned whether all of them come from a single hoard, given their striking differences and the fact that they entered the market through antiquities dealers rather than documented digs.
When this kind of transformation is framed as artistry, the object acquires a new biography that begins with the person who reworked it, diverting attention from the more difficult question of where its materials originated. The Barakat Gallery, a multigenerational antiquities dealership with locations in London and Los Angeles, has faced similar criticism for its “Painted African Sculptures,” a series said to “bridge the gap between old and new, traditional and abstract.” The collection includes 19th- and early 20th-century carved figures attributed to the Songye, Luba, and Metoko peoples of Central Africa, which dealer-turned-artist Fayez Barakat has painted over and sold for prices reportedly reaching six figures. (Hyperallergic contacted Barakat Gallery for comment.)
Barakat Gallery’s involvement with disputed material long predates that collection. In 2005, the Islamic Republic of Iran sued the London-based dealership in UK High Court over objects it said had been looted from Jiroft, a Bronze Age site in southeastern Iran discovered in 2001 and almost immediately subjected to intense looting. The Court of Appeal ultimately upheld Iran’s title under its patrimony law, a ruling still cited in cultural property law as a landmark for source countries seeking the return of looted objects, even when those objects entered the market through supposedly “good faith” purchases.
Painting over a Songye figure or resetting Ziwiye plaques in diamonds does more than recommodify decontextualized and potentially looted cultural objects; it also makes provenance research much harder. The market prefers to describe such acts as conservation, or at least as harmless appreciation, arguing that ancient objects otherwise headed for storage, obscurity, or destruction are being “saved” and given new relevance through aesthetic use. In that telling, repurposing launders the harmful histories attached to the objects: something looted or unethically sourced becomes a desirable design piece, while the uncertain early chapters of its life are compressed into the word “ancient,” used as a credential rather than a warning.
Zendaya’s earrings briefly and inadvertently focused attention on a routine market practice. The hope is that the scrutiny does not fade when The Odyssey premiere does.
