Meet The Juilliard School's 2022 Fendi Vanguard Award Winners
The Juilliard School and Fendi held their annual scholarship program, where four bright young Juilliard School talents will receive the latest 2022 Fendi Vanguard Awards.
Photography Danielle Levitt
Styled by Rachel Gilman
If fashion is about looking perpetually forward, then it makes sense to go where the future is. That’s why Fendi has teamed up with The Juilliard School once again for its Fendi Vanguard Awards, an annual scholarship given to four Juilliard students across the college’s primary disciplines of music, dance, and drama. This group of up-and-coming performing artists are bursting with talent and personality, even as they navigate the usual senior year anxieties of what’s next after graduation.
Raven Joseph (BFA ’23, dance) has been dancing since early childhood. “My mother put me into dance when I was three years old, because she didn’t want me to break all of the furniture in the house,” she laughs. Joseph’s compulsion to keep moving has been handy as she masters ballet and the various modern styles of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, and others while at Juilliard. Unlike many students who come to the famous school from all over the world, her high school, LaGuardia, was just down the block. A Queens native, the dancer is a New Yorker through and through who loves getting a BEC (bacon, egg, and cheese) at the corner bodega and sitting in Central Park just as much as perfecting her art at the barre. Her favorite thing about her home city? “The community!” she says without hesitation.
"The community of students at Juilliard is one fo the most exclusive and accomplished in the world."
The community of students at Juilliard is one of the most exclusive and accomplished in the world. Alumni include Jessica Chastain, Oscar Isaac, Renée Fleming, and Yo-Yo Ma. Mary Beth Nelson (Master of Music ’23, voice), an operatic mezzo-soprano, came to the school to pursue her master’s after singing professionally for a few seasons across the country. For Nelson, being dressed by Fendi for performances and recitals this year has brought her closer to her art while performing. “It informs the character that I’m playing; the color, you feel it on your body,” she says of wearing a dress from Spring/Summer 2022 inspired by illustrations by Antonio Lopez. “You’re inspired in a new way to communicate. Helping me to elevate my craft, to perform at my highest level,” she adds. This fall she will star in the Handel opera Atalanta at Juilliard, performing alongside fellow Vanguard recipient Peter Lim (Master of Music ’23, historical performance) who is studying harpsichord, historical oboe, and recorder.
Lim was drawn to early music for its insistence on detail and the subtlety in technique you must master to make a good interpretation: a harpsichord has no dimmer pedal, so each note, right or wrong, stands out. If the world of early music veers older and somewhat stuffy, Lim, who grew up in Seoul, South Korea, is determined to bring a fresh sensibility to the genre, especially when it comes to performance. “I try to coordinate my colors with the harpsichord as much as possible,” he says of his recital looks. His original interest in fashion came from spending time at his aunt’s hair salon in Seoul. “I’ve always tried to dress well or explore new styles. It never stayed in one place,” Lim says of his ever-evolving attitude towards dressing. Since harpsichords come in a variety of colors, he has a rainbow’s worth of suits in his wardrobe to match the instrument for his recitals. “Not a lot of people [in the early music world dress colorfully], maybe because they are a little too conventional with this idea of a black tuxedo or dress suit. I plan on breaking that.”
Stella Everett (BFA ’23, drama), not unlike Lim, grew up with an irrepressible love of fashion and dressing along with her art. “I genuinely get excited every day to dress myself. It’s a creative outlet,” she shares. Growing up in Sydney, Australia, Everett studied ballet as a child, then caught the acting bug as a teen. One thing she loves most about the creative environment of Juilliard is that students aren’t afraid to be proud of their accomplishments and talent. “In Australia,” she explains, “there’s this concept of, if you think of a field of poppies, they want each one to be the same height. But if one poppy starts to get a bit taller, they’ll cut it down.” Tall poppy syndrome, as it’s come to be known; Everett is happy to be somewhere that celebrates one’s gifts instead of hides them. “Coming to New York was amazing because I was surrounded by these people who were celebrating people being good at stuff,” she says. Her favorite role in her time at Juilliard has been Arkadina, the matriarch in the Chekhov classic The Seagull. “Delicious,” she says of the iconic character.
One benefit of the scholarship is that it puts these young artists, all studying different crafts, in communion with each other in a way that their demanding class and rehearsal schedules would otherwise prohibit. For instance, the group (minus Everett, who had a late rehearsal, naturally) all got birdseye seats for the Fendi Winter Capsule show this past September at Hammerstein Ballroom. Watching the spectacle from above—Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Kardashian were among the front row guests—they couldn’t help but see the innate theatricality of the evening. “It sort of reminded me of Ascot opening day from My Fair Lady. It was so chic,” says Nelson, comparing it to the highly stylized scene from the classic musical. Joseph picked up on the models’ choreographed walks across the set, which she attributes to her “dancer brain,” a habit of tuning in to gestures or moments in daily life and subconsciously applying them to dance.
The collection, which celebrated the Fendi baguette bag’s 25th anniversary and featured collaborations with Marc Jacobs and Tiffany & Co., was the hottest ticket of New York Fashion Week, with a surprise appearance by runway legend Linda Evangelista closing the show in a Tiffany blue cape. One universal surprise among the students was how quickly it was over. “Seventeen minutes...all of that work!” exclaims Nelson.
The pastel and neon looks may have gone by in a flash, but one thing is for sure: these four creative stars in the making will have staying power.
HAIR Thomas Dunkin
MAKEUP Mark Edio
PRODUCTION Lindsey Gardner and Isaac Feria
PRODUCTION DESIGN Montana Pugh
PROPS Kyle Miller, Jon MacGregor, and Megan Otnes
DIGITAL TECH JP Herrera
PHOTO ASSISTANTS Diego Bendezu, Isaac Schell, and Milos Janjusevic
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS Julia Fesser, Paul Bentson, and Dom Nadal
