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There is a swarm of people gathered in Jordan Roth’s studio for a couture fitting. It’s hard to say exactly how many because new ones keep streaming in and out, carrying boxes of shoes, having tiny huddles to discuss whether his hair should be in a low bun, handing out iced coffees by the dozen. The tenor of the room is so gravely serious, so singularly focused on Roth, that it’s hard to discern each person’s role. Patti Wilson, who styles Cher, is here with an assistant who is taking notes; there is Roth’s own personal assistant, whose last job was at Beyoncé’s company, Parkwood; and there’s Roth’s social media manager, who has been filming the whole thing. The designer Robert Wun is not here in body, but his face is floating on a laptop via Zoom from Hong Kong, where it is about 3:30 in the morning.
“Right now [the weight] is entirely on the hip bone, which is not amazing,” Roth says to Wun in the same tone you might use to convey displeasure at a paint color you knew wouldn’t work but went ahead with anyway. They are discussing the gown Wun has created for the 2026 Costume Institute benefit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This will be Roth’s eighth appearance at the Met Gala, and the dress code, Fashion Is Art, is particularly on-brand for someone who lives his life as a performance. Wun’s creation is a sand-colored velvet dress, which he suggests and Roth agrees is not the right color and will eventually be swapped for a thundercloud gray version. It covers Roth’s entire body—his neck, his arms, his fingers—with enough fabric that it puddles on the ground. It is so voluminous that on the first Monday in May, the Mark Hotel will have to remove the bed from Roth’s room to accommodate the dress, the sculpture, and the team. Today the drape is not the problem. What Roth is troubleshooting is a 35-pound humanoid sculpture emerging out the back of the dress and wrapping its arms around Roth’s upper body—a faceless specter looming over him that one armchair critic likens to something from Spirit Halloween. Roth’s inspiration was the Jean-Léon Gérôme painting Pygmalion and Galatea.
At one point something about the way the sculpture is perched atop Roth’s lanky frame is deemed extraterrestrial. “We are already veering towards alien. We need to stay away from alien. We are not in Star Trek,” says Roth, who then cradles some of the excess fabric of the gown and says “Here’s my velvet baby” before the social media manager asks him to repeat it to the camera. “Here’s my velvet baby,” he trills again, eyes to the camera this time. The gown needs a name, Roth declares. “Sisyphus,” I call out. He likes it. The camera turns to me. “But are you Sisyphus or are you the rock?” I ask. Roth responds, “Well, that’s the story of my life.”
Sisyphus will eventually earn no fewer than 10 Instagram posts, ranging from red-carpet imagery to an earnestly composed studio session, to a collection of third-party meme reactions, to several docu-style videos, each with the camp production values of a Bravo reality series. (“Is there something on my back?” Roth asks in one, referencing the ghostly figure careening overhead. “God bless the person sitting next to me.” “Are we the first three-way at The Met?” he asks his husband, Richie Jackson, in another.) Like all of Roth’s content, there is a mix of dead seriousness, dry sarcasm, and wondrous joy in equal measure. He often laughs. He sometimes cries. And he always dresses and undresses like a 50-year-old Barbie in front of a rapt, bewildered audience of a million followers.
This past spring Roth celebrated hitting that 1 million Instagram followers with two meter-tall gold mylar balloons and a caption that read, “I’m wildly grateful that we’ve found each other, that we are walking this path of discovery together.” Alongside is another video in which Roth, wearing a floor-length gold coat, pays tribute to himself, telling his audience that “your being here helps me express me,” followed by a slow-motion highlight reel of his appearances in a coterie of gowns.
Jackson likes to quote Warren Beatty in Madonna’s documentary Truth or Dare when describing his husband: “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk. There’s nothing to say off camera.” “Richie calls it the Lucy and Richie show,” Roth says. “He’s not wrong.”
The day after his Met Gala content wraps up, Roth will post a video welcoming his followers to Venice, where he will stage a one-man performance in a palazzo on the Grand Canal during the opening of the Biennale. (His debut as a performance artist last year took place at no less a venue than the Louvre.) The following month, the Broadway executive will attend the Tonys and the Tribeca Film Festival, post behind-the-scenes content from his Purple magazine cover photographed by Steven Klein, and announce the August 5 premiere of his acting debut in Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, marking a new milestone in his multihyphenate odyssey. One could say that he is, finally, famous.
Characters like Roth have always invented themselves in New York. Standing six feet one in flats (not that he ever wears them), Roth, the son of a billionaire, went from bookish Princeton grad to Tony-winning theater producer but wanted more. The past decade has seen Roth leverage his audacity (and fortune) to develop an internet persona that can be described as the Marchesa Casati meets RuPaul. He has become so visible among Manhattanites that he has even become a target for homage, or perhaps lampooning: The creators of the Gossip Girl reboot wrote in a character named Gideon Wolfe with long hair and a penchant for outrageous designer clothing, men’s and women’s. (When I asked his representative what Roth thought of this depiction, she replied, “He is aware,” and did not elaborate.) And now Roth is transforming once again, into a performance artist and an actor.
Roth considers himself “pretty open” but in hours of interviews evaded many questions about his money, his family, even the neighborhood he lives in. Nonetheless, a portrait emerged of a peacock producer who has undergone a complete metamorphosis. And while plenty of colleagues and acquaintances were all too eager to speak about those topics anonymously, almost nobody wanted their names attached. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the goodwill, or sheepishness, that Roth engenders. At least one person put it bluntly to me, saying, “It’s crazy how in America, you can decide you’re someone, and with enough money, you can make it true.”
So is Roth a theater producer or a fashion influencer or a performance artist or a television actor? The answer is yes. And he is relentless. Is he an emerging artist taking on new mediums, or is he a decadent inevitability of our late-stage attention economy? Is he both? Whatever the case, he is a cultural conquistador who’s only just begun.
Roth grew up in northern New Jersey and later Manhattan, the son of Steven and Daryl Roth and brother to Amanda. The family owned a private plane and employed a driver who chauffeured him to Horace Mann. At Princeton he studied philosophy—his thesis was on the subject of desire—and theater. He told a journalist that after graduating from college in 1997, he had what he called a “crisis of wealth” brought on by living in a West Village two-bedroom his mother chose and helped decorate. In the same interview, he recalled an elementary school classmate who told him they thought he would have given a bigger birthday present.
The primary source of this abundance was real estate. Steven Roth is among the largest landlords in the city through his company Vornado Realty Trust, which owns approximately 20 million square feet of New York City commercial space (for which the going rate is around $100 per square foot in Midtown). In May, Roth père said on an earnings call that the phrase “tax the rich” can be “just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs,” adding that his fellow billionaires should be “praised and thanked.” He is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a longtime confidant and supporter of President Donald Trump. (“My dad’s friends and politics are his and mine are mine,” Roth tells me when pressed for comment.) Roth’s maternal pedigree is a little more culturally ripe: Mother Daryl is a Pulitzer Prize–winning theater producer whose work includes both August: Osage County and Proof. (At the 2026 Tony awards, Jordan held Daryl’s hand as she waited to learn whether she would secure her 14th win for Liberation. She did.) “Rumor is he is worth nine figures, which is life-changing money but not world-changing money,” speculates one close New York City observer, though definitions of world may vary. (Roth, through his representative, would not confirm his net worth.)
Roth has always had real intelligence and, crucially, ambition. Shortly after college, he auditioned for an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was later called The Donkey Show. The role required a costume of tiny shorts and a great deal of body glitter, which was, he says, “not a place in my journey with my body I wanted to be in.” Instead, at 23, he helped them find a theater and put it on—in other words, he produced it. The Donkey Show played for six years Off Broadway. He had briefly considered becoming an academic but instead followed in his mother’s footsteps and ensconced himself in the theater. As one Broadway person puts it, he was automatically an insider with his money and mother’s connections but simultaneously an outsider for effectively buying his way in. However he got there, he was talented and immediately successful. His first Broadway production was the 2000 revival of The Rocky Horror Show that made him the youngest lead producer ever nominated for a Tony at just 25.
In 2005, Roth joined Jujamcyn, a company that owns five Broadway theaters, as a resident producer. The next year he became vice president, and in 2009, a year before he earned an MBA from Columbia, Roth became president and co-owner of the company, taking a 50 percent stake for an undisclosed amount. When he upped his stake in 2013, Variety estimated the transaction to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
“Broadway has never understood what to make of him,” says one longtime observer. The Shuberts and Nederlanders, the two other dynasties who own the majority of Broadway theaters, did not have similar offspring trying to merge hands-on creativity with management. But Roth had a vision for how his unique combination of attributes could not just benefit his own productions but the theater world at large.
“As an artistic producer, Jordan Roth brings a most unique combination of taste, brilliance, ambition, and genuine love,” says Lear deBessonet, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. “He knows how to care for artists and to see a path for the grandest realization of their dreams.”
“When Jordan was running Jujamcyn, he always brought his trademark creativity and appetite for visionary work to bear on the shows he presented,” says theater director and longtime friend Michael Mayer. “While it always seemed to me that he was more personally invested artistically than the prototypical theater owner, who is primarily focused on the real estate and financial perspective of the productions, he really could handle both aspects with astonishing skill. He learned at the knees of his parents, who were standard-bearers of each discipline.”
Under Roth’s leadership, Jujamcyn amassed hits like Hadestown, Kinky Boots, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, and an overwhelmingly acclaimed revival of Angels in America, cementing his place in the firmament of contemporary theater. He has won seven Tonys and four Drama Desk awards. The New York Times has written at least four glowing profiles of Roth, calling him variously “a New Force on Broadway,” “a Broadway Big Shot,” “a Broadway Bigwig,” and a “Broadway Mogul,” and declared that he “redefines clout” in yet another. New York magazine called him “an Industry Evangelist,” and the South China Morning Post even called him “edgy.”
As a producer, Roth wasn’t solely focused on the bottom line; he organized a Broadway fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and another for President Biden, and is quietly generous across a number of causes. He had a reputation for being both artist-friendly and aggressively advocating for shows he wanted. Roth was unusually dedicated to the tiny details too. At Jujamcyn he introduced smaller ice cubes that would melt faster to reduce clinking noises in the audience. For Mean Girls, he troubleshot long lines for women’s restrooms with ushers carrying signs that read “#FollowMe (I’m the line for the ladies’ room).” The work of a producer can be tedious; collaborators note that Roth’s approach has always been long on passion and short on complaining.
In 2023, Jujamcyn merged operations with Britain’s Ambassador Theater Group (now ATG Entertainment), where Roth remains a board member and creative director, presumably creating a windfall for him. Two years later he sold his former apartment in the West Village for a reported $20 million and acquired a town house that is decorated liberally with Braquenié’s Coromandel silk, which sells for around $600 per yard. He lives among paintings from Elizabeth Peyton, Francis Bacon, and John Singer Sargent; a Lalanne sculpture is currently on loan to The Met. He rechristened his 1899 home in the Hamptons, which was designed by the same architect who did nearby Grey Gardens, LoveLee, and has welcomed both Oprah Winfrey and Pete Buttigieg as guests.
It was also around this time when he started applying the same combination of money, vision, and passion that he brought to the theater to his fashion.
Until a decade ago, Roth sported a military-style buzz cut and usually wore a Prada suit in either gray, navy blue, or black with an untucked shirt, no tie, top button unbuttoned, and sneakers. In 2017, while working on upgrading the Tonys red carpet, Anna Wintour simply asked Vogue’s menswear editor, Michael Philouze, “Don’t you think Jordan should wear Gucci?” So off to Gucci the two men went. There, Roth was presented with two options: a maroon tuxedo and a cherry red silk suit with a tiger embroidered on the back. He put on the latter and it unlocked something in him, an almost macho approach to dressing, of winning at all costs. And he was willing to pay.
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Designers quickly embraced him. “He understands that at the end of the day, you have to enjoy what you put on your body, and it has to have a sense of humor—he’s incredibly sarcastic,” says Fernando Garcia, the co–creative director at Monse. “There is never a heavy moment with Jordan. He can talk about politics to Love Island in one sentence.”
For Roth, it also opened up something else. “I was very aware in my early days of dressing when there was a skirt on that rack. That’s women’s clothes...I was also aware when that started to drop away. It wasn’t women’s clothes or men’s clothes. It was just, those are my clothes.” Designer Iris van Herpen says he’s one of the most pleasant clients to work with. “I don’t know anyone who does it like he does—he’s so free in his approach to masculinity and femininity.... The universe is just open with Jordan.”
“I am allowing myself to paint with all the brushes” is how Roth puts it.
Eventually, Roth’s appearance started to change. His body got lankier and his cheeks sharper, aided by a gluten-free, dairy-free regimen wherein, for example, he orders Goop Kitchen almond-flour pizza but picks off the cheese. His overall effect became more androgynous, whether in or out of women’s clothing.
He grew his hair long past his shoulders, bleached his eyebrows, and started buying and wearing couture. Whether by his choice or their design, he is rarely seen in the front row of the grand maisons—Chanel, Dior—but instead champions another tier of the couture landscape: smaller designers such as Wun and van Herpen. Nor does he order the kind of custom-fitted little skirt suits that some VICs—Very Important Clients—flock to, but the most outrageous gowns. Take, for instance, the feather-print Glenn Martens for Maison Margiela with the matching mask and black Tabi boots that Roth wore to the 2026 Tony Awards. He towered in his seat to the point that I felt sympathy for nominated actor Nicholas Christopher, who was seated behind him. When asked what he’d like to see Roth wear, his friend the designer Thom Browne quipped, “A gray suit,” and laughed before adding, “I love how he’s having fun with it and how serious he is about it all.”
Even fashion kids have taken notice. Reid McVey, a college student studying fashion design who works at the archival designer emporium Desert Vintage, started following Roth for his Met Gala looks but stayed for his everyday maximalism. “What keeps me hooked is how he genuinely enjoys fashion, and he’s unapologetic about it,” McVey says, noting that his style is the antithesis of the quiet luxury that defines our contemporary idea of good taste. At a brunch in the Hamptons attended by a mix of writers and Broadway people, the conversation came around to Roth and the millions of dollars he had likely spent on fashion. One acquaintance piped up to defend him, saying, “Listen, someone’s got to buy the couture.”
Many VICs enjoy posting about their fashion excursions—shopping for custom looks in Paris, wearing them everywhere else—but Roth has operationalized his content creation. On Instagram, he seems to have discovered that maybe his most significant talent is fanning attention in his own direction.
Jackson, his husband, a Nurse Jackie executive producer who wrote a 2020 parenting guide titled Gay Like Me, with whom he has a son and stepson, is often the sole person helping him out of elaborate looks at the end of the night. “It’s so intimate,” Roth says. And still he puts his camera on the mirror and films it.
The couple met in 2003 and married in 2012 at Jujamcyn’s Al Hirschfeld Theatre in front of about 600 guests, including Donald and Melania Trump. (Roth has spoken out against Trump.) Jackson has been by his side—literally on nearly every red-carpet photo and every charity dinner—for the whole transformative ride.
When it comes to Instagram, Roth understands that the extravagance and gesticulating animation juxtaposed with nearly naked moments makes for a bizarre spectacle from which it is hard to look away. Standing in his boudoir the size of a one-bedroom apartment, Roth often looks half like Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games and half like a housewife in a Douglas Sirk film. In one video he gives a tutorial on mixing prints. “I think everything can go with everything,” he says as he pairs a black-and-white polka-dot pussy-bow blouse with black-and-white plaid pants, a black-and-white tweed jacket, and a zebra-print clutch. In another video he shows off a flesh wound on the back of his neck from a zipper pressing against it all night. He almost always seems to be having fun at his own expense.
Not everyone is charmed. “He’s so profoundly unserious right now,” says someone who’s known Roth for years, not hesitating to gossip about their charismatic friend anonymously. They say this with love, they hasten to add—they feel Roth is too smart for this, that he’s laying out a lot of money and effort into something that doesn’t require his intelligence and won’t earn him more Tonys. The implication is that pursuing social media fame is fine for an influencer, but why is he doing it, to what end? There is no obvious monetization—or any need for it. His peers find it all a bit baffling. “Jordan wasn’t happy just being rich and having a great life,” one New Yorker snipes. Perhaps instead of naming his Met dress Sisyphus, they would have called it Narcissus. Roth’s retort to all that is that “accusations of unseriousness are how girly boys have been put in their place since the beginning of time.”
To Roth, his entire life is performance and it is his art. “We are all in daily acts of performance, but I don’t take the word ‘performance’ to imply artifice,” he says.
He means the art part literally. The next time I visit Roth’s studio, in late April, he is rehearsing a solo show that will coincide with the opening of the 2026 Venice Biennale, considered the art world’s holiest of holies, a goal to which most artists spend their whole careers aspiring. Roth has spent months planning a performance artwork inspired by Irene di Spilimbergo, a 16th-century painter, student, and muse of Titian who at one point lived in the Palazzo dei Fiori. A collaboration with Performance Space New York, Roth’s artwork saw him cut collages out of life-size vinyl prints of di Spilimbergo’s paintings, revealing himself behind them. A digital camera captured images every six seconds.
Like the Met fitting, there are once again about 15 people in his studio, including Julia Crockett, a movement coach who is helping guide Roth to remember the choreographed cutting and poses they had worked out. She watches intently and calls out shorthand between them. “Yes...yes.... Do your thing.... Nice, nice, love it.... This is great to linger on, it’s very strange.”
The piece played twice in Venice to an audience from a mix of backgrounds: Michèle Lamy, the wife and muse to Rick Owens, was there; the gallerists Glenn Scott Wright and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn; Scott Rothkopf, the director of the Whitney Museum, where Steven Roth was a trustee. If he was viewed as an art-world interloper, Roth has enough influence and goodwill that no one was really going to say that out loud. One Biennale attendee, impressed by Roth’s commitment, tells me, “He definitely gave his all. But this woman next to me was straight-up scrolling his Instagram feed and looking at his Met Gala look.”
Roth says the purpose of the piece was to meld with the paintings. “What keeps coming up for me is this object-subject. So I’m looking at the painting, then I am changing the painting. I am being viewed while I have the ability to see while I am being seen,” he says. Narcissus, again.
The performance garnered some coverage in elite arts publications. There were photos in a New York Times recap of the Biennale. Art Forum called Roth “the soaring, fashion-forward image-generator who is not only the GOAT of Broadway producers but also a red-carpet mainstay of the Met Gala.”
It wasn’t Roth’s first foray into the art world, a realm so snobbish that it makes fashion look downright homey. Roth added performance artist to his résumé in 2025 with “Radical Acts of Unrelenting Beauty,” where he soared above cloth re-creations of the I.M. Pei pyramid outside the Louvre, the venue that also inspired mementos given to special guests. The New York Times ran a rosy story in advance of his debut with accompanying videos of Roth in a white gown. Many critics remain skeptical that this artist’s debut, or any artist’s debut, deserved to be in the Louvre. Someone who attended a dinner in Manhattan for a cause Roth chaired recounts how “there was this over-the-top toast about the great artist Jordan Roth. I was like, Wait, Jordan is an artist now?”
At a recent party on Fifth Avenue, someone who only really knows Roth through his online presence remarks to me that he should pair up with Ryan Murphy. Fortuitously, two days later, Roth announced the premiere date of The Shards. In it, Roth will reveal yet another public transformation, playing Steven Reinhardt, a Hollywood fixer in Murphy’s adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel about teenagers in 1981 Los Angeles during a serial killer spree. Roth’s character is a leering but strangely centered presence in leather outfits and a two-tone wig that the adolescent stars seem not to know if they should fear or feel reassured by.
Sarah Paulson, a mainstay in the court of Murphy whom Roth had known for years through Broadway, was the catalyst for his casting. “I asked, ‘Would you ever want to do acting?’ and he said, ‘Oh, yes.’ And I said, ‘What about something in the Ryan world?’ ” Roth was indeed already on Murphy’s radar. “Ryan presented [Steven] to me as more cutting edge and kind of an aesthetic force,” Roth says, seeing some of himself in the character.
“I was instantly taken by him,” Murphy says of Roth. “The interesting thing is he changes like the wind. It’s incredibly brave, sometimes shockingly emotional, what he does. He’s his own work of art.” Murphy is already at work writing the second season of the series.
“My plan was always to be an actor,” Roth tells me, adding he desires to continue for the long-term. “I’m never leaving. From the first take I felt, Uh oh. Here we go.” (Currently, Roth is exploring acting in a feature film about the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and his older patron-of-the-arts boyfriend Sam Wagstaff. The Shards costar Homer Gere will play Mapplethorpe; Roth will play Wagstaff.)
Does Roth’s ambition include a full-circle return to Broadway as an actor? Of course it does. He wants to do “a deconstruction of an existing famous musical,” and he’s already talking to old colleagues about it. “I would love to see him do Steel Magnolias,” says Kaia Gerber, another The Shards costar.
The Shards will be yet another chance to collapse the line between real life and life onscreen, not to mention an opportunity to ruffle some feathers of the rigid cultural establishment in the process. But what happens if he ever drops the act?
At the core of all these publicly performative artistic endeavors is a common theme: ambiguity—of cultural genres, professional occupations, and he is most ambiguous when it comes to gender. It is the rare subject that Roth is willing to address directly.
“What I don’t love, and what I do pick up on in my body and heart, is discomfort. Those moments where it feels like where I am causing you confusion by my existence causes me discomfort.” Referring to the looks and double takes he gets when using a public restroom, he says, “If you have to ask, it means I have failed at making [myself] legible, and we have been led to believe that making ourselves legible to one another is our responsibility. I am coming to release that responsibility.” Roth’s progressive ethos of genderfluidity is a useful way to think about how many people feel about him: They just don’t know what to make of him, and they cannot look away. The gap between his sarcastic self and his performance of himself can be, for some, confounding.
What seems to gall most people I spoke to is his bombastic, overly serious, and entitled self-creation. He pins those negative reactions on his sexuality, his fluid gender, and their ignorance.
There is a symmetry between the way he approaches all of this—his gender, his art, and his life online—which is that there’s really no separation, and no way of perceiving, this man without his mask.
Roth already has everything money can buy, so the only real adventure left is in his constant transformation. Success for him is not whether he will be accepted as a true artist or actor. His sincerity, the fearlessness of trying—very hard and very publicly—is success in itself. He has spent his life delighting in proving his doubters wrong. And who is to say Tonys are the only awards he’ll ever get? What matters is that we’ve tuned in to the Jordan show. He thinks we should have been watching all along.
Fashion Editor: Daniel Edley; hair products by Act+Acre; hair, Brent Lawler; makeup, Sil Bruinsma; manicure, Elle Gerstein; tailor, Susan Balcunas. Produced on location by Madi Overstreet. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
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