The Costume Designers Guild is asking for fair treatment. During some historic shifts in Hollywood, The Costume Designers Guild, IATSE Local 892, is seeking to close a large pay gap among other pressing issues. The CDG is 87% female, and they are 45% lower on the IATSE pay scale compared to their male-dominated creative department heads.
Most recently, the CDG posted an update about the IATSE’s ongoing negotiations with Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers: a new bargaining day is set in June.
Until then, conversations and questions will continue. In the meantime, we can all agree with costume designer Vera Chow: “pay us more.” Chow, who’s worked on The Brothers Sun and The Walking Dead, spoke with Immersive about some of the pressing issues costume designers face in the industry.
What conversations are you having with your fellow union members about what you want to see going forward to get equal treatment as artists? Do you think there’ll be pay equity or parity?
A difficult question, because I know people want equity, and parity is a constant conversation with us that… it’s not the same thing. I feel for the union negotiators, too, they can’t please everybody. A lot of people want equity right away, and it’s a long-game because we’re trying to undo over 100 years of institutionalized procedures that are very gender-based. So, it takes time.
The rates are horrifically different, that’s the thing. I know equity is not going to come quite that quickly. I mean, I know how much production designers make. We make half of them even on a good day. Is that nice? No, but one thing I really want to fight for that is difficult is royalties, but then that also applies to a very small number of costume designers. Like Brothers Sun and Walking Dead, where does that land? Because it has nothing to do with how good the designer is. It only has to do with how successful the movie or show gets, whether or not something is iconic or not.
For The Walking Dead, I can have a T-shirt and jeans [for a character], but do I own that? Do I not? But then that’s iconic enough. So ironically, it’s very unfair that if royalties are in place for our contracts, that I could actually get fucking royalties for a T-shirt and jeans, and that’s not cool. And hypothetically, if Everything Everywhere All At Once did not get the recognition that it deserves, such iconic costumes would not get royalties. I don’t know, and maybe that’s what the negotiators are here for is that we need to be recognized more for the impact we have in fucking just entertainment and creative history. Where do we stand in terms of our skill versus commercial success has nothing to do with us versus what is Jenny Beavan‘s (Mad Max: Fury Road) costumes versus Negan’s leather jacket, which is fricking everywhere. I don’t deserve royalties from Negan’s jacket, because that’s silly. It’s a motorcycle jacket. Maybe that’s why it’s such a difficult conversation. It’s creativity, so I can’t really put words to any of it.
The bottom line: pay costume designers more money.
Yes. Bottom line is pay us more. It still kills me that costume designers don’t get single card unless their contract asks for it. That’s wild. When you watch the single cards, especially in episodics, you see the costume designers lumped in rolling credits. That’s crazy. To me, that still blows my mind that our agents have to fight for it. If it’s not in your contract, we don’t get it. How is that? That’s crazy.
Recently, I went to this talk with Ruth E. Carter and a young, aspiring costume designer asked her, “How did you get to the part of your career where you got paid what you deserved?” Carter responded, “Am I paid what I deserve?”
Exactly. Is she though? Is she though? I mean, there is a very interesting phenomenon within the costume department that says something about how the system is a little bit broken because designers get a flat, which is scale or even just a little bit above scale… Now I’m getting very technical, but when we go scale and then a show runs a certain way, we are usually making less than our costume supervisors and our ACDs because they’re hourly. So, then there’s a lot of talk about costume designers leaving early, but at the same time, can you really blame us because we don’t get it? So then what that leaves us is that we start fighting for royalties.
Back to your point of just paying us what we deserve is that almost on every job, until I got to a point now as the head of the Walking Dead or Brothers Sun, where my agent can argue above scale, before that I was making less than my team. That’s a little silly. I appreciate my team, and I think my team works way harder than me. I could probably not be there for two, three days and the show would keep running. If ACD and supervisor were gone for five hours, the show would probably fall apart.
But at the same time, how does that systemically make sense that we make less than the rest of our team because we’re flat? So then that leaves us, like I say, to negotiate with our agent. Then once we negotiate the above rate, then that loses the motivation for designers that are at that level to continue the fight because then suddenly we’re exempt from that fight because we’re above scale now.
I feel like that is something people are not really talking about, that the system is so unfair, it forces us to be every man for themselves. It’s kind of making us do it. If we don’t have that, if the pay for costume designers is what we deserve, we might not have to do that. We might not have to be every man for ourselves. So, we just negotiate with our agent, get to the point where these rules don’t hurt us. And then when you get to that point, how many would actually reach out and be like, “Just raise the base rate.”
Are you hopeful at all?
Hopeful. Super hopeful. I mean, if there’s any chance this would happen, it would be these few years. I feel like it is a cumulative effect from #metoo, from COVID, from Black Lives Matter, Asian hate. It is a sea change. I’ve been in this for 20 years. In the first 15 years, nothing happened. Suddenly, everything everywhere all at once is happening in five years. So if there is change, this is the chance.
