For our March 2018 Fashion Issue, we spoke with three of our country’s top fashion influencers, held in high regard due to their impeccable styles and the impact that fuels their growing following. In the second part of the cover feature, Heart Evangelista-Escudero reflects on her journey in fashion as a young actress to an artist in her own right
The term ‘influencer’ has been tossed around on and off the web for quite some time now. Many internet personalities with a growing following develop an affinity with this buzzword, tacking it onto their social media accounts and mixing it in with the rest of their biography in the ‘About Me’ tabs of their websites. The online Cambridge Dictionary defines an influencer as someone who affects or changes the way people behave. This annoints the term a little more gravitas than we normally associate it with, given how casually it is bandied about. Heart Evangelista-Escudero, Kim Jones, and Liz Uy, who have been on the radar well before the advent of social media, are influencers in every sense of the word, especially in the fashion sphere. We flock to their Instagram accounts, eager to know who they are wearing, where they are travelling to, and what their next projects might be. Yet these women are more than what they wear; they are representative of years of hard work, a drive to put one’s self out there, and a vision that continues to resonate with a wide audience.
All Heart
She entered the showbiz industry at the age of 14, endearing local audiences with her portrayal of the chic, ultra-feminine Missy Sandejas in ABS-CBN’s teen-oriented series G-mik. Though Love Marie Ongpauco-Escudero (or Heart Evangelista-Escudero, as she is most known by) was already a fashionista as a little girl—she wryly recalls falling down the stairs while parading around in a pair of her mum’s high heels, paying for her trouble with seven stitches along her right eye—she believes that playing Missy was the ticket to discovering the earliest form of her style identity.
“I was always preferential to the classics, but I was highly experimental when it came to my fashion choices,” Evangelista-Escudero shares. “I was surprised when I found out that people were taking notice of what I was wearing because I felt that I was all over the place back then. And at the time, the local fashion scene was still a bit on the conservative side. We weren’t really expected to dress up unless it was for a show, event, or magazine feature.”
At a time when the internet was not what it is today and online searches would yield very limited results, magazines were Evangelista-Escudero’s primary guide to the fashion world. Her mum and her sisters collected various titles, and she would browse through them to keep herself in the know. Relationships with designers would come later; her debutante gown was designed by Inno Sotto, whose work and friendship she continues to enjoy today.