Stellar HEART

Riding a career high, Heart Evangelista-Escudero dares to dream even bigger

- TRINA EPILEPSIA BOUTAIN

The last time we saw Heart EvangelistaEscudero, actress-artist-content-creator-animal-lover-crazy-rich-Asian-Vogue-100, was at the launch of a luxury brand. The rumblings of the coronavirus were just starting to get louder, but we were still bussing cheeks, drinking too much champagne and freely sharing limited spaces. In a crowd filled to the brim with Manila’s loveliest and most glamorous, where the baubles were bigger than golf balls and the dresses costing more than two month’s salary, Heart still stood out, still managed to turn heads and elicit the kind of enthusiasm the fashion set usually reserves for sample sales.

That was, ridiculous as it sounds, two years ago.

Since then, the pandemic happened, putting everything to a halt and sending all of us into this dystopian limbo, including our cover star.

FULL STOP

“You know that my world was just always on fast forward. After working for almost 24 years it was such a high with my career, with my profession,” she says without a trace of conceit. There were invites to fashion shows, dinner with the heads of fashion houses and even Hollywood was supposedly calling. “It was taking me to different places, and there were just so many opportunities opening up and then all of sudden it just stopped.”

One minute she was Heart in Paris, and the next she was stuck at home—lucky to be healthy and privileged to be able to stay home—but stuck nonetheless.