Want to Get Paid $250,000 to Wear a Dress? Become an A-List Celebrity

Stars: Just like us, in that they can often be found wearing clothes; and yet nothing like us, in that they’re apparently paid up to a cool quarter million to parade around in theirs.

Let’s thank their big-mouthed stylists for ~~tattling on them~~ sharing the deets:

At the Vulture Festival’s Hollywood Power Stylist Panel on Sunday in New York, The Cut Senior Editor Isabel Wilkinson asked stylists Jessica Paster, Erin Walsh, Brad Goreski and Brandon Maxwell about their long-term clients, how they measure success and what celebrities really get paid to wear certain brands.

“The whole point of having a stylist is that you can make more money, or more people will want to hire you or the brand that you’re wearing is making more money because it’s driving sales,” said Maxwell, who works mostly with Lady Gaga and on editorial projects. “It’s all wrapped up in money. It’s Hollywood, we’re not at church!”

Get that sequined backless number out of the confession box, ya heard?

Both Maxwell and Goreski said they’ve never been offered money to ensure one of their clients wears a certain designer. “It’s not like they’re trafficking drugs,” said Goreski. “They’re wearing a dress. So what? If somebody offered me $150,000 to show up in a beautiful dress by ‘x’ designer, I’d be like, where do I sign?”

I honestly don’t get why this was even a point of discussion, when it’s already pretty obvious to the masses that celebrities, who are paid to endorse everything from wine to credit cards to bacon, would be paid to wear a dress or a particular designer. Perhaps it’s a matter of the creative soul being inherently sensitive: the designers (even those with established reputations and a long list of viable customers) want to be wanted by the A-listers, or at least give off the impression that the celebrities’ desire to don their designs is organic, not commercial.

And yet—

Goreski said he often pulls newer designers for last-minute events. “If we get a call that one of our clients is going to an event that night, we are going to pull what we have access to,” he said. “So if there’s a young designer in a showroom and I think your dress is dope, I’m pulling it. I’m not going like, ‘Oh, I don’t know who this person is.”

In other words: a celebrity will still head out on the red carpet clothed, one way or another. Got it.