Zendaya: The Last Piece of American Soft Power That Doesn’t Require an Aircraft Carrier
Zendaya: The Last American Export That Isn’t a Drone Strike
By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between a Cannes after-party and a UN climate summit
PARIS—On a continent that still thinks Mickey Mouse is a viable national-security threat, the arrival of Zendaya Coleman on any red carpet instantly triggers the same diplomatic protocol reserved for visiting heads of state. Gendarmes clear motorcades, Eurocrats practice their “I’m-totally-cool” smiles, and the French cultural attaché pretends he didn’t just Google her. It’s the sort of soft-power flex Washington hasn’t managed since Obama traded cigarettes for Nobel Prizes—only this time the weapon is a custom Loewe breastplate and a stare that could sanction oligarchs.
From Lagos viewing parties to Seoul subway ads, Zendaya has become the rare American product that doesn’t require an aircraft carrier for delivery. Her face—equal parts Renaissance cherub and DMV line—greets commuters on Mumbai billboards hawking Bulgari, while in Buenos Aires teens binge Euphoria through VPNs like it’s bootleg democracy. Hollywood used to export Schwarzenegger explosions and Tom Cruise teeth; now it exports an ex-Disney kid who weaponizes silence better than most UN envoys. Call it imperialism with better lighting.
The numbers are almost vulgar. When Lancôme announced her as house ambassador, Chinese pre-orders for the Idôle fragrance spiked 300 % before anyone could even spell “linalool.” In Riyadh, MBC executives credit her Spider-Man cameo for a 24 % bump in female cinema attendance—no small feat in a country where movie theaters were banned until 2018. Even the Germans, who measure joy in spreadsheets, reported a 17 % YoY rise in Zara sales of “archival” cargo pants the week she wore them to a Dune photocall. Somewhere in Davos, a consultant just billed McKinsey €400k to explain “The Zendaya Effect,” which is corporate Latin for “people like looking at attractive humans; please wire the retainer.”
Of course, the darker joke is that her omnipresence coincides with America’s retreat from every other kind of leadership. While Congress debates whether books are edible, Zendaya quietly supplies the last universally agreed-upon narrative: that excellence can still be Black, young, and female without requiring a 30-page think-piece or airstrike. The global south nods knowingly—finally, a colonial import that doesn’t come with structural-adjustment interest rates.
Yet the cynic’s eyebrow arches higher. Her fashion choices—those sculptural Valentino armors, the robotic Iris van Herpens—look less like couture than exoskeletons against a planet that’s literally on fire. When she glides past paparazzi in a breastplate, one wonders if she’s headed to the Met Gala or the front lines of a climate refugee column. Either way, the lighting is immaculate. Meanwhile, the same algorithms that amplify her image also sell Qatari real estate to crypto fugitives and convince teenagers in Jakarta that skin-bleaching is self-care. The empire doesn’t decline; it simply pivots to influencing.
Still, there’s something perversely hopeful in watching autocrats and ayatollahs discover they can’t censor what they can’t comprehend. Try banning Zendaya and you merely create a black-market thirst trap. Iranian Instagram accounts crop her Louis Vuitton ads into hijab-compliant collages; Russian state TV denounces her as a “Western psy-op” while quietly booking the same stylist for propaganda anchors. The Streisand Effect has a new face, and it’s wearing Lancôme Teint Idole Ultra Wear Foundation 490.
So we toast her at 3 a.m. in Nairobi airport lounges, in Tokyo capsule hotels where salarymen queue for Euphoria merch between bullet trains. She is the final shared hallucination before the lights go out—a last-ditch consensus that beauty, however fleeting, can still outrun the algorithmic doomscroll. When historians excavate our era from beneath melted server farms, they’ll find a single artifact intact: a 4K still of Zendaya in a backless robot dress, captioned in every language that ever existed with the same four words: “She understood the assignment.”
The assignment, by the way, was distraction. Mission accomplished.
