On a scale of 1-5000, how annoyed do you get when people have the gall to tell you, “Wow! You’re so lucky!” when they find out that you work in entertainment and with celebrities?
Also on a scale of 1-5000, how unimpressed are you with the celebrities you end up working with?
Please share some horror stories so we can commiserate over nightmare clients! 😂
Yeef and also yikes, do I actually want to dive into this particular can of worms? Lmao.
I thoroughly see spots of red in my vision whenever people try to do the whole “Wow, that’s really cool and lucky for you! How many famous people have you met or worked with? Your life must be so glamorous and exciting!!” Like please, spare me. It isn’t glitz and glitter all the time - in fact, the fun parts are in the minority of how working in this industry goes. Beyond that, I’m not ‘lucky,’ I worked my ass off to pull this off and have never slowed my pace (until this COVID-19 chaos) to ensure my post remains relevant. In accordance to your ranking, I guess I would go with 4999 points annoyed.
Frankly, my rating and impressions of my clients are like a river that flows on and on and yet there is no apparent water to be found. I have a good rapport with most of the ones I am contracted with exclusively, but they're prone to make my feelings change from sentence to the next. Celebrities will forever remain exhaustively effervescent.
If you really want some dish, I can offer up some from a client I once worked with in my apprenticeship and how much I hate the time I had to spend with her while also retaining a sense of gratitude for helping shape me into someone that can withstand some of the prickly goings-on of the industry. She wasn’t even my client, as I was merely apprenticing and therefore was little more than a ghost that shadowed one of the veterans of our company. I’m highlighting this now before diving into the thick of what was the worst week in my career thus far because it is extremely important to keep in mind that I was under no actual obligation to work with this woman.
Ahem, so, story time! Let me start off with first making it clear that even now I will only work with actresses and actors when I have no viable means of refusal. This is simply a preference of mine and stems mostly from this woman’s behaviors and treatments of me and some of the crew I worked with at the time. I was quite young when I entered my apprenticeship, like barely more than 20, and I was simultaneously accustomed and starstruck by the world I was entering. Before the apprenticeship, I had already been working off and on via temporary contracts and commissions as a MUA at the time, so I knew the ends and outs of the place and the people that worked my end of it. However, I hadn’t worked with many clients one on one as either a MUA or as an aspiring wardrobe stylist. Due to this I was still very green and awkward and hadn’t yet figured out the line between casual and professional (to this day, for me, this line is nearly nonexistent) and I tended to make a mess whenever I opened my mouth so mostly I kept quiet and melded into my role as an observing trainee with occasionally useful ideas but was mostly just an extra pair of hands. The stylist I was shadowing was, in a word, cumbersome. They weren’t a very great teacher and had a tendency to drop projects into my lap without much proper instruction or insight and would leave me to attempt making sense of what was wanted by means of vision boards and client portfolios. In much a similar fashion, when a scheduling conflict came up involving the actress which will star in this tale and another more major artist; naturally, he had to see to the client he had a more tangible contract with and stuck me with wrangling our golden girl.
Within the first 4 sentences of our first exchange as stylist and client I hated her immensely. She was the type of client I abhor to work with; overbearing and demanding, thankless and impatient. She was in the midst of her career finally catching some interest which is the most pivotal time in any celebrity’s career and I like to think she was so bitchy and just plain mean due to the stress and pressure she was under but it doesn’t make what happened any more justifiable. Her immediate and first words to me were, “You’re young and clueless enough to be my baby sister. Whatever authority you think you can have in dictating what I wear ended with the sound of the door opening when you stepped in, get that straight now.” I remember this extremely clearly because I went from gobsmacked to incensed within the time it takes to pop the top on a can of soda. But! I knew at least enough to know to keep my mouth shut and temper my immediate dislike of this person and tried to push forward and steer the conversation in the direction of what her ideal style and presentation should be. It went well enough for all of an hour tops before she domed me again by calling me “baby sis” in place of my name. As I am, in fact, the baby sis of my family I am well aware of when a power play is being maneuvered in on me and spotted this for what it was: her trying to remind me that I had no right to be speaking to her, let alone designing her. This was a culmination of her being upset and put out that she wasn’t chosen by my mentoring stylist and was stuck with someone that had basically no merits behind her.
Calling me this wasn’t really an issue for me, but it did chafe against my skin enough to make me feel uncomfortable and anxious. Still, I let it slide and she continued to call me as such for the duration of our time together. The true horror of this story is what comes next and the escalation from minor verbal insults meant to belittle me fanned into blatant sabotage. She and I had come to a sort of estranged agreement when it came to modeling her vision board - she wanted to retain some traces of her perceived sweet and demure self from when she was cast in her first role, but play up the maturity and grace she held now and have it reinvented into timeless class while holding a touch of being chic. It was a headache to make sense of since, from a the perspective of fashion and trends at that time, this wasn’t the ideal and even seemed counterintuitive to someone in her position and of her age. I went along with it and threw myself into the quest to pull from the brands she mentioned liking most and for days I learned firsthand how exhausting and tedious it is to make acquisitions and swear responsibilities/accountabilities one after the other and put my name and my company on the line. I handpicked every item and steadily managed to pull off forming my second ever ensemble of 4 sets of styles each with 2 or 3 substitution items that could alter the look entirely while still remaining within the realm of what the client had asked for. I worked upward of 13 hours for 4 days and when I finally was able to bring the client to her showroom and present my designs, I was only able to feel relieved for mere minutes before she began to yell and make a scene. She demanded my supervisor and the head of the styling department of our company both come to tend to her and see what a mockery I had made of her ideal image. She went on to use her acting quirks to insinuate that I had gone off half-cocked and overruled her every idea and word and then dared to present her with such low quality fashions. She even managed to produce a vision board that was entirely different from the one she and I had planned together! It was obviously done by herself and lacked the detailed attention any of the stylists housed in our company would have added, but it was convincing enough to appear damning.
At this point my head was in a weird place, trying to make sense of the perilous world I was throwing myself into and the fact that this was actually happening to me at all and wasn’t just me daydreaming while watching daytime dramas. After I worked through that initial shock, I was more than mad but less than enraged. I was confused as to why this client was being so purposefully obstinate and difficult for me, even briefly wondered what sort of grievance I could have possibly cost her when I had only just met her and had done my utmost to seem cool and pro like all the seasoned stylists I had worked with. I thought I was going to lose my job and have to go back to my family with my tail between my legs and tell them they were right and I never should have strayed from my original course and career path. I only became aware that I was crying, like big fat tears that made a mess of my face and were embarrassing to the point that I wanted to flee, because my supervisor had given me his handkerchief. It was at this point that I teetered and looked deeply at the person accusing me and wasting my time and efforts and realized that it wasn’t about me and was only ever about her. This moment of clarity, though, was like the opening of a gate I had been clinging to all week in hopes of keeping all my spurned senses quietly simmering beneath my skin rather than wreck my name and finish off my chances before they truly begun. I very rudely told my supervisor and the department head that if they needed proof of my hardwork and dedication to the vision of a thoughtless actress caught in the weeds of her own wilting fame then they were free to examine my copy of the original vision board and compare it with the one she had; that they could check through the 15 or so LORs under my name and in her stead (both names are featured for security means). Anyway, she was attempting to spill a stain across our company and specifically the stylist in charge of me for blowing her off. Her idea was that if I failed in a big way it would make him look like a horrible mentor and cost him some of his reputation. I was merely cannon fodder.
This got insanely long - let’s put it up to me also being a storyteller and writer as well as very passionate about this encounter. It sparked the timid embers of my uncertain pursuit of my career into a fire that has since gotten me through many other rounds of hard hitting clients and their excessive personalities and entitled arrogance. I love my job a lot, but man is this industry full of bullies.
In the 6B art styling would you mind elaborating on "Mythological Based Designs"? Does it simply mean design based on mythological figures/creatures or is it talking more along the lines of old depictions of mythology?
We were thinking designs based on mythology (Gods, Goddesses, mythical creatures, heroes, legends, etc.) but any way that you chose to fulfill the prompts is okay!
What is my objectively correct style, if this ask meme is still in play?
Hmm. Your Objectively Correct style is intricate bioluminescent tattoos (if you can’t afford a good genetic engineer, glowing body paint is an acceptable substitute).
