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Popular American actress, Zendaya faced criticism after she wore a pair of 3,000-year-old Iranian gold discs at a London photocall for Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey, CNN reports.
The discs were mounted in 18‑karat gold and diamonds and turned into earrings by jeweler Glenn Spiro for his Materials of the Old World collection.
Barron London later said the pieces are part of its private collection and not for sale, with many insisting that these objects should never have been on the red carpet in the first place.
According to MSN, Spiro, who collects historical objects, described his work as making ancient items feel modern and wearable.
One review of his collection praised how the pieces make “fragments of forgotten empires” feel reborn.
That kind of language shows how repurposing often turns artifacts into exotic fashion statements.
The backlash began quickly online, and archaeologists led the criticism. They argued that turning artefacts into jewelry encourages their commodification and exoticisation instead of preserving them solely for historical meaning.
The Forensic Archive of Iran has since started a petition asking for clear information about the discs’ origins.
Critics also noted the seemingly poor timing, of The United States and Israel attacks on Iran, causing many casualties and destruction of cultural heritage.
Commentators, links this incident to a broader pattern of Western 'ignorance' for the ethics of trading and displaying Middle Eastern cultural goods.
London writer Zirrar Ali said Western celebrities often ignore questions of ethics and history when it comes to the Global South.
Skeptics argue that, such incidents highlight a common, underexamined practice in the art market of taking archaeological, ethnographic, and funerary objects and altering them into jewelry, furniture, or decoration.
For instance some Roman, Egyptian, Phoenician, and Islamic beads are often reshaped, or even remade to be used or sold as luxury items.
These changes, they say, destroys the archaeological information that could help date and understand the objects, unlike conservation, which tries to preserve objects for study and repurposing, making the 'damage' irreversible.
Barron London described the discs as “Ziwiye gold medallion plaques, circa 1st millennium BC Iran,” linking them to the Ziwiye treasure found in 1947.
But that sometimes most of those items were looted before proper excavation, leaving many items without reliable provenance.
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