“People don’t want to pay or treat you fairly because what you do is for ‘fun’. They think it will only take you five minutes. Well my five minutes costs fucking money – pay me for it,” says London-based celebrity stylist Michael Miller, who has dressed actors including Willem Dafoe, Alfie Allen, Callum Scott Howells, and Asa Butterfield. Miller is the driving force behind the Celebrity Stylist’s Union, a newly formed group for UK-based celebrity stylists which seeks to establish a baseline for fair pay and treatment within the sector. The action chimes with the striking efforts of SAG-AFTRA (the American actors’ union), many members of which are CSU stylists’ clients.
The catalyst for the union was a particularly intense press tour in summer 2022. Miller noticed that all of the hair and makeup teams were chatting, laughing, and swapping stories, whereas the stylists were all holed up in their individual changing pens, not saying a word. “It just felt like you could drop a pin, there was so much tension in there,” Miller says. That tension and lack of camaraderie was, Miller felt, playing into a lack of solidarity within the sector and an inability to tackle the stagnant rates and shoddy treatment stylists were facing on jobs, dressing celebrities for premieres, press junkets, photoshoots, public...
The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited has denied claims that it is selling scrap materials from its refineries, warning the public to disregard such information and remain alert to fraud...