Victoria Hiegel, personal assistant to a celebrity client she cannot name because of a nondisclosure agreement, spent 13 February ferrying Valentine’s Day cookies across Manhattan. Her boss “doesn’t love chocolate,” so Hiegel had to hunt for a bakery that could swap the batch’s chocolate chunks for sour hearts. She posted part of her search to TikTok, where she received thousands of views from people keen to watch her cater to the whims of the rich and famous.
Hiegel, 26, is a microcelebrity in her own right. Wearing her blond hair in carefully styled waves and speaking with a practised ease, she has obvious star appeal. But it is her career that fascinates her 1m followers.
“I was initially really scared about posting,” said Hiegel who started working for her current employer four years ago, citing the NDA. They’ve since compromised: “I never film around her apartment, and I can never say what she does for a living. That would be really bad. It would be even worse if people knew who her husband was,” she said, teasing. While commenters are sure it’s Anna Wintour she works for, Hiegel said she will never tell. “I can’t even walk with [my employer] in public any more, because then people will know.”
Hiegel is among the most prominent figures in an emerging class of service workers – including private chefs, assistants and stylists, most of them women – who are monetizing the backstage maintenance of celebrity by documenting their work across TikTok and Instagram. They have influencerized tasks once defined by discretion: mixing a “six-step drink regimen” for the “funniest movie star in Hollywood”; pocketing a $1,000 tip from rapper Big Boogie; eating Popeyes with Ray J; and even degreasing Meghan Trainor’s camera lens. Other parts of the job remain invisible by necessity, as in the case of Hiegel’s mystery employer – although ultimately, all of the conjecture only helps her engagement.
The trend reflects a broader shift in celebrity culture itself; fame is no longer assumed to be self-evident, but is increasingly understood as constructed and forcefully sustained. Fans now speak easily about figures such as Tree Paine, the longtime publicist for Taylor Swift, and Lena Dunham’s social media ghostwriter. The trend is bringing the economic realities of private staff further into view, too. Private chefs say they wear their whites even on off-days just in case they’re called. Hiegel says her job “totally bleeds into her personal life”, demanding a constant state of readiness that blurs the line between paid labor and private time.
For many assistants, social media offers practical benefits. Some entered the field soon after graduation, uncertain whether to pursue corporate or creative careers but capable of taking on roles requiring equal parts organization and improvisation. Visibility online can be a hedge against the precarity of service work, a way to accumulate an audience, and therefore future opportunity, beyond any single employer. “You’re always so replaceable, so many people work for these celebrities for free,” said Dafne Mejia, private chef to celebrities including the Kardashian-Jenners. “My platform has definitely helped make my job more secure,” she said, since it functions as a safety net in case employment falls through.
There is also an immediate financial incentive: creators like Hiegel say they earn significantly more from posting content than from their day jobs (pay for these roles can vary widely, with some staff pulling in solid six-figure salaries).
Gabby Mayo, 37, an Atlanta-based personal assistant to rapper and actor Ludacris (and formerly actor Uzo Aduba), found her job a few years ago via a domestic household agency that connects the wealthy to hired help, and applied on a whim to a listing. The staffing agent told her the employer was “kind of famous. His name’s Chris.” When Ludacris (legal name Christopher Brian Bridges), showed up on the introductory Zoom call, Mayo muted and paused her video. “I just screamed,” she said.
A few months in, after her friends asked a few too many times what the job actually entailed, Mayo began posting her “day in the life” videos with Ludacris. “No day is the same: shopping for shows, packing bags, family stuff, literally everything, at anytime.” She insists it doesn’t feel like work. “It’s like going to my uncle’s house. He’s just so cool.” She runs every video by him first – he prefers to post content from concerts and photoshoots himself – and typically forgoes all the mundane parts of the job to broadcast cruising around on Ludacris’s private yacht or flying on his jet. “He doesn’t mind me posting because he just enjoys me,” Mayo said, “but I always want to make sure I’m not posting anything I’m not supposed to.”
Khristianne Uy, known online as Chef K, cooks for members of the Jenner-Kardashian family. She had no intention of building an online presence when she started doing it five years ago. “I was traveling with a client who was active online,” she recalled. That client was James Charles, the makeup artist with more than 23m YouTube subscribers. Charles featured her in a post and then suggested something that, at the time, bewildered Uy: “You don’t post on social media? Let’s make a TikTok.” She claims she didn’t even know what TikTok was.
That clip, which showed everything Uy had cooked for Charles in a week, performed unexpectedly well and combined with his encouragement gave her “the push to start consistently sharing on my own channel”. She now has well over 1m followers across her Instagram and TikTok.
Still, Chef K, who is 42 and based in Los Angeles, is careful to note that social media can distort perceptions of the profession. Audiences are naturally drawn to the flashy aspects of the job, while overlooking the years of discipline and technical skills required to reach such positions. “Most of us started washing dishes and making mistakes before we were trusted with anything important,” she said.
Mejia, a chef who moved into private work during the pandemic, recalls a time when filming in the kitchen was frowned upon. Now it’s more like a necessity: “We have to post so we get followers who will want to come to our restaurant, or whatever.”
Mejia, who is 33, films “day in the life” content with her clients: picking up $700 worth of groceries from Erewhon for a single meal, cooking octopus on an enormous grill. But the sheen of celebrity doesn’t awe her. “You don’t even think about being in this famous person’s home because there’s staff everywhere,” she said. “Their kids are always so spoiled. They have nannies who are 24/7.”
She cooks often for the Kardashian-Jenners, a family who’ve long served the illusion of access and intimacy, “but they rarely actually film in their own house; they’re renting a house”. Mejia is working up the courage to ask the family whether she can film in their home kitchen. “They’re so private,” she said. “They want people to know their lives, but not like that.” Having worked with Kris Jenner for only a year, and picking up occasional substitute days cooking for Kim Kardashian, she worries about seeming opportunistic: “I don’t want to be that chef that’s like, ‘Hey, can I record?’” Maybe, she figures, she’ll ask “like, three years in”. Ultimately, she needs to expose more people to “a product, which is either myself or the food”.
In some cases, celebrity employers and agencies see a strong, polished online presence as evidence of discretion, taste and proximity to influence. The shift, Mejia notes, has reached some industry gatekeepers. She recently came second in Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, for which she was selected based on the strength of her cooking as well as a social media presence. “The first thing the Fox network asks is how many followers you have,” she said, “and it’s like, why do you care about that?”
Ki’Loni Lee, 30, a personal assistant based in Atlanta working under strict nondisclosure agreements for musicians and actors, describes social media with cautious pragmatism. She still calls herself “really, really lowkey” despite her visibility. Her videos show only fragments of her shifts, which typically run from 4am to 1am the next morning, and she is one of the only creators to remark on the stressors of the job: the extremely long hours and lack of downtime. “I get so many emails from people who want to know how to get into the industry, so this is my way of sharing tips and what to expect,” she said. For her, posting is more about mentorship than self-promotion.
In one of her early posts, Hiegel documented a search in Manhattan for a particular set of black silverware requested by her client. Millions watched as her prosaic task unfolded as a kind of miniature quest. An hour before she took a call for this story, a fan stopped her excitedly on the street. “When people watch my videos, they feel like they’re on a FaceTime with me.”
Hiegel sees this as a generational shift in how audiences relate to fame and wealth. “It’s such a trend right now for. Gen Z is really interested in access to luxury as opposed to owning it,” she said, pointing to the growing popularity of luxury rentals and a wider online fixation on wealth. After all, this is a generation facing prohibitive housing costs, stagnant wages and diminished prospects of ownership. “And I think that all of that coincides with people getting sick of the creators they made famous starting to completely neglect their audience.”
It’s an arc that troubles the influencer economy: creators who once felt accessible have accrued major brand deals and notoriety that suddenly made them seem out of reach, ultimately undermining their initial appeal. Watching someone shop for someone else’s vintage handbags, source a client’s onyx black forks, or add spirulina cilantro to Adam Sandler’s morning smoothie is more tantalizing than watching an influencer show off her own 24 karat gold Labubu.
With her TikTok money and fame, Hiegel is finally able to shop vintage Chanel for herself, but she takes care to remain proximal to her audience: “It’s totally fine to buy nice things, but we don’t need to see your Birkin.” As her audience grows, she imagines one day needing an assistant to help her manage it all, hinting at a future in which more and more assistants to the famous become famous enough to require assistance themselves – the backstage maintenance of celebrity expanding until it becomes a stage all its own.
