Jordan Roth on the Power of Fashion and His New Life as a Bona Fide TV Star

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A decade ago, Jordan Roth was a reserved Broadway producer in a trim, gray Prada suit, little known outside the tight knit world of New York theater. Now he’s a couture-clad red carpet icon, an Instagram sensation, a performance artist, and — thanks to a decadently camp turn in Ryan Murphy’s hit FX show The Shards — a bona fide TV star. He’s also proof positive that fashion — when wielded with genuine passion and fearlessness — can be truly life changing.

When did you first fall in love with fashion?

I was always aware of fashion as an escape, as a tool, as a magic carpet. Even as a child, seeing beautiful fashion made me feel something. I remember my mother going out in this extraordinary white strapless dress that still resonates with me. In first grade, I was in a talent show at school, and of course I took it way more seriously than anyone else. I sang a song from The Wiz, and I found this emerald green GUESS shirt with a bit of a power shoulder and I put these circles of emerald green glitter on my cheeks, like a doll. That’s what I remember. Not the singing. Not the performance. It’s the clothes—how much weight they carried for me.

You’ve had so many iconic looks over the past decade. What is your favorite?

That’s an impossible question. I can’t. But I will say that the Iris van Herpen look I wore for the Met Gala “Camp” [exhibition] was a meaningful piece for me, because it was one of my first experiences of cocreation with the designer at a high level that was also a sort of personal excavation.

Jordan Roth at the 2019 Met Gala in a couture look by Iris van Herpen (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

That look also launched you onto a world stage as an emerging style star.

Absolutely. And I think people started to understand, and I started to understand at the same time, that I was working toward something that was more than just getting dressed.

Are you ever nervous about an outfit?

Always. And in the early days of this high-wire act— because that is what it feels like on those big nights— if I looked at any images right after the event, I would spiral. Then I’d wake up the next day and look again and I’d be like, “Oh, okay. We’re okay.” So, mostly, I have just learned to not look that night.

Is there anything you won’t wear?

I haven’t found it yet.

Jordan Roth on his way to the 2026 Met Gala in Robert Wun (BFA)

What prompted your transition into acting?

I always thought I was going to be an actor. Growing up, that was always my passion. It was what I was doing at school, in extracurricular programs, at camp, and then, ultimately, what I trained for in college.

But you started producing instead.

I found this play called The Donkey Show [based on William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream] and I loved it, but I didn’t want to act in it because the character they wanted me to play wore these little go-go shorts and body glitter and at that point in my relationship with my body, I was like, “I can’t do that.” But I loved the show. They were doing a sort of garage disco aesthetic, and I thought it should be a Studio 54 disco aesthetic, in a real nightclub, so I went out to find one and that was how I started producing. I just kind of fell into the role and it fit well for me at the time. That period is also when I birthed the uniform of my business life: the black, blue, or gray Prada suit with the white shirt untucked and the buzz cut. That was my uniform of authority as a 22-year-old trying to run a business. And for a long time I thought that [uniform] was how I would ride out the rest of my life. But then I started to feel bound by it, and for the first couple of years I didn’t quite know what that was. And then I started to understand that I was missing my own creative expression. Then I came to understand that I had this daily opportunity, when I was getting dressed, to express myself. That I could look at each day of clothes as a small creative practice. [Through that practice] I started to sort of steer my way toward this form that I have come to call “narrative fashion performance.” It started at these events and then the performance art—the Louvre and Venice—grew out of that. And while I was engaging with this mode of personal expression, I realized that I was also reengaging with my actor self, and just waiting for, searching for, how that would come out. I knew it had to happen—and I desperately wanted it to. Do you know this story?

As I understand it, Sarah Paulson suggested you try acting in something of Ryan Murphy’s, and then Ryan proposed the character of Steven Reinhardt in The Shards to you. Had he ever seen you act? Did you audition for him?

No, but what he had seen, unbeknownst to me, was my Instagram. He’d actually been following along quite closely and seeing the building of these different characters there.

Your relationship with your body derailed your acting career in your twenties. Has that changed?

My body and I have been in a long, complicated relationship all of our lives. I always felt that my body was wrong. As a child, it was too fat and then not boy enough. And then, when I came out, I thought that would all be lifted, but my body was still not boy enough. So I spent years working out and trying to be bigger with more muscles, less hair, more this, less that. And it was only when I stopped trying to make my body [be something else] and allowed it to be what it naturally wanted to be—something both masculine and feminine at the same time—that it started serving me, that I could understand it and live in it. And I think it all comes back to the clothes I wanted to wear. They wanted this body—the one I had been rejecting—and I came to understand that my body wasn’t the problem, it was the struggle that was the problem. And those of us who are in complicated relationships with our bodies are always in complicated relationships with our bodies. These don’t just go away. But we come to live together with a little bit more peace and a little bit more grace.

How did you prepare for your role in The Shards?

I spent several months working with [acting coach] Greta Kaufman on building the character and with [movement director] Julia Crockett on revealing the character’s physicality. And then while we were filming, preparing each of the written scenes as they came out.

Your character, Steven, has some of the most camp outfits in the show. How much influence did you have over his look

A lot. When Ryan first called me to do this part, he said, “We will find the look together.” And I thought he was just being nice, but he really meant it. And the direction he gave me in that first conversation was that he imagined Steven was scouring the runways of Paris, the music scene in London, that he was aware of what was happening culturally. And this is before that was easy to do, like on Instagram and on the Web and wherever. So I printed out every runway show from 1981, and I did a deep dive on the New Romantics and New Wave and that whole London scene, and then the first thing I started thinking about was the hair, and my first impulse was [David] Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and I was talking about that with Brent Lawler, who does my hair in my life, and he said I should look at [singer] David Sylvian, and he sent some pictures and I was like, “Yep, that’s it!” So Brent made a test wig and I did some pictures and I sent them over, and Valerie Jackson, who is the head of hair, was like, “This is amazing,” and showed them to Ryan, and he was like, “Yep, that’s Steven!” Then, when we first were looking at mood boards with Josh [Marsh], Lou [Eyrich], and Serrita [Coleman]— our costume designers— they were talking about Saint Laurent—the person, not the brand—as a sort of silhouette inspiration. But then, when the hair came, that felt like a mismatch, so that turned into what Steven is now: the broad shoulder and the nip waist, and that sense of power that he’s striving for. And the shoes were vital. They brought in what is actually a current Saint Laurent shoe, but it has a very long toe and a real chunk of a heel, but it’s still a man’s shoe. Early on, I had the impulse that Steven was pushing the envelope as far as he could in terms of his expression, just until he got his hand slapped. So that heel, it’s still a man’s shoe, but the heel is just a little bit higher than regular. And then his nails are painted, but they’re painted nude, so they’re not screaming, but they’re there. So there are all these different ways in which he’s kind of screaming from the inside. And once we got the look, his physicality and his body and his courage came quite naturally.

Jordan Roth as Steve in “The Shards,” Episode 8

What was it like working with the other actors: Kaia Gerber, Homer Gere, Evan Rachel Wood, Wes Bentley?

It was truly the most joyful, supportive group. There was real camaraderie. I didn’t know how much I missed that, and how much that is part of being in an acting company. And it made the process such a joy. And to get to work with people that you love and are wowed by is a gift. And then there’s Ryan, who is the mastermind of it all and is such a brilliant student of our culture, the way that he synthesizes so many references across time and space and then creates worlds out of them that we get to live in. First as actors, but then also as audience members.

And you’re working on a film now about Robert Mapplethorpe and his lover/benefactor Sam Wagstaff?

I’m in the early, early days on that, but I’m interested in the relationship between them. I have always been interested in that sort of relationship—Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist and the person we believe is the business support. Probably because I hold both of those roles in myself, and I think both of them are artists, so I’m interested in that exchange of power in that relationship. You’re changing so quickly and taking on all these new projects. Do you ever have any doubts? All the time, but what I’m learning to do well is to question whose doubts they are.

Are they my doubts, or are those somebody else’s doubts I have internalized?

And regardless of whose doubts they are, the work is to have the doubts and do the work anyway.