Law Roach is careful not to let client relationships get too personal.
Speaking on SiriusXM on Saturday, the celebrity stylist said he tries to keep clear boundaries with the people he works for.
“I always had a rule not to become friends with clients,” Roach said.
He described his relationship with Zendaya as the exception, saying they had “grown up together” and are like “family.” With other clients, he prefers to maintain some distance.
Roach shared an example he uses with his assistants and people who work under him to explain why mixing friendship and business can get tricky.
“They say, ‘Come over, let’s have dinner,’ and then they say, ‘Oh, would you go to the closet and pick me out an outfit?’ How are you going to send them an invoice?” Roach said.
He added that’s where maintaining a professional boundary becomes important.
“This is your business, this is your livelihood,” Roach said. “It blurs the line, and I want to get paid.”
This isn’t the first time Roach has spoken about keeping his client relationships separate from his friendships.
In a 2015 interview with VH1, Roach said he generally avoids hanging out with clients, since they’re paying him to do a job.
“You see them at their most vulnerable — no hair, no makeup — so in that situation we do build a really strong relationship. But for me, because I see what happens with a lot of stylists, I chose to make it really professional,” Roach said.
Other celebrities have similarly spoken about keeping some separation between work and friendship.
In 2025, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer said they deliberately avoided spending too much time together outside work while making the show.
“We weren’t hanging out as friends during ‘Broad City.’ We couldn’t,” Glazer said.
“It was just, after 12, 14 hours of Monday through Friday, we were like, ‘Let’s not do dinner on Saturday,'” Jacobson added.
Treating colleagues like personal friends can make work more enjoyable, but also create tension because the two relationships operate under different expectations.
Hakan Ozcelik, a professor of management at Sacramento State University, previously told Business Insider in 2024 that workers should bring their “best professional selves” to work rather than their “intimate selves.”
“Our intimate selves and our needs and our desires and our purposes in our intimate roles as human beings should be fulfilled in other domains in our lives rather than at work,” Ozcelik said.
There are several ways to maintain boundaries at the workplace, even with colleagues you consider friends. Etiquette coach Mariah Grumet told Business Insider in January that people should avoid gossiping or discussing sensitive subjects with coworkers, no matter how close they are.
“We shouldn’t be bringing up anything too personal, such as religion, politics, personal health concerns, appearance — anything like that that might be crossing over that boundary,” she said. It is also important to avoid making jokes about others that could be received poorly.
“You can never be too careful with being respectful,” she said.
