Zendaya Clocked Him: That Lip Sync Clip Said Everything
Zendaya and Tom Holland have been together long enough now that people forget the origin story — which is always when the origin story becomes interesting again.
*By Dua Mifsud*
There is a clip circulating that Zendaya's publicist would very much like everyone to stop watching, and naturally the internet has watched it approximately four million times. It is from *Lip Sync Battle* — old footage, technically harmless, technically ancient history — and it shows Tom Holland performing for Chrissy Teigen while Zendaya sits in the audience. Her face does something involuntary in the space of about two seconds. Not jealousy exactly. Something more interesting than jealousy: the unguarded, unedited face of a woman who does not yet know she is in love but her body has already decided. The comments section has been doing forensic work on this clip for days and honestly? The comments section is not wrong.
Zendaya and Tom Holland have been together long enough now that people forget the origin story — which is always when the origin story becomes interesting again. They met on *Spider-Man: Homecoming* in 2016, denied everything with the energy of people who were absolutely not denying nothing, and then confirmed the relationship in 2021 when a paparazzo caught them at a red light in Los Angeles and the game was over. What the *Lip Sync Battle* clip reminds you is that the feelings came first, by a considerable margin. That face is not a 2021 face. That face is 2017 at the latest.
What makes Zendaya and Tom Holland the most quietly compelling couple in their generation's front row is precisely what makes them so difficult to cover: they are genuinely private without performing privacy. Jennifer Lawrence has been married since 2019 and most people genuinely forgot — that is performance. Zendaya and Tom Holland are simply careful, which is a different thing entirely, and considerably rarer.
Meanwhile, A$AP Rocky appeared in public this week long enough to confirm what everyone has been waiting a decade to hear — that Rihanna's next album exists, it is being made, and his exact words were "she cooking." Two words. The man delivered those two words and walked back into the life they have built and closed the door behind him. As press runs go, it was minimalist to the point of art. As information goes, it was enough.
The Prada Bonnie bag, spotted on Bella Hadid and Selena Gomez within what appears to be the same news cycle, is not a coincidence. It is a campaign, and a very good one. When two women with that level of style opposition both carry the same bag, the bag has already won autumn.
*Rumour Has It runs every morning. The good stuff is always in the face people didn't mean to make.*
