Castoff fashions donated to Juilliard School students for recitals
NEW YORK — In a sunlit studio space at the Juilliard School, the prestigious arts institution at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, Marie Engle emerged from a makeshift mirrored dressing room on a recent Wednesday in a to-thefloor fuchsia jersey gown with a plunging neckline.
“You’re beautiful!” said Pam Bernstein Friedman, 71, hurrying over to a rack of shawls.
“If I’m performing at a summer recital, wearing a pink dress could be fun,” said Engle, a mezzo-soprano from Ohio by way of Vienna who is studying for a master’s degree in Juilliard’s vocal arts department. She admired herself in a mirror and then returned to the dressing room to try on a dark brown velvet gown. Perhaps unconsciously, she began to hum.
“I don’t sound like that in the shower, that’s for sure,” Friedman said, as she rifled through a rack of garments, looking for more options.
It was the second annual “shopping day” for OnStage, a program created last year by Friedman in which women donate black-tie gowns and cocktail dresses to Juilliard’s students, who are expected to be outfitted in fancy attire at their many auditions and performances, as well as at galas and parties. These singers try to avoid being photographed in the same ensemble twice.
With the conservatory’s tuition, as well as the cost of living in New York, this all can get very expensive, very quickly.
“Last year I walked away with two Tadashi Shoji gowns,” said Felicia Moore, a soprano who played the lead in the school’s production of Katya Kabanova. “I was on the verge of tears when I tried them on.” She wore one of the dresses to a gala last summer at the Merola Opera Program in San Francisco.
“This is the best day of the year,” said Kelsey Lauritano, a mezzo-soprano who starred in December in the Juilliard concert production of Ravel’s oneact opera L’enfant et les sortilèges. Friedman approached her carrying a cap-sleeved crushed velvet and chiffon dress in lavender that she herself had worn to her 50th birthday party in 1996. “It’s a size small,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
Friedman, a retired literary agent, began attending many concerts and recitals at Juilliard after her husband, George Friedman, died in 2012. “The music from these incredibly talented students is what is getting me through a difficult time of my life,” she said. But something was distracting her. “There were these beautiful voices coming out of horribly dressed girls,” she said. “I learned that they couldn’t afford all the dresses and gowns that they needed.”
Friedman began to think of her own closet, filled with designer dresses and gowns that had long hung dormant. “I thought, ‘I know so many women, we don’t dress like this anymore, we don’t go to as many black-tie events and when we do, we wear just black.’”
She emailed 50 friends, many of them entering a less onthe-town phase of life, asking them to “shop in their closets,” she said. Within weeks, her Fifth Avenue dining room looked like a designer showroom, with 10 racks of finery by Carolina Herrera, Vera Wang and the like. She also took in their castoff satin pumps, brocade shawls and statement costume jewelry.
Ellen Marcus, for whom the Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts at Juilliard is named, emptied her closet for the program’s inaugural year, and urged a number of friends to do the same. “Fifteen years ago, when something was black tie, you wore a grand, elegant ballgown,” Marcus said. “Now people dress more simply, wearing sometimes even just a pretty top with silk pants. But performances require something more.”
This year, Marcus cast off more gowns still, as well as four tuxedos belonging to her husband, who died in 2015 and was the board chairman of the Metropolitan Opera for many years. In fact, Friedman had tried to solicit a surfeit of friends’ surplus tuxedos but she learned that most men don’t have closets full of extras.
Anyway, scena: For students entering the cutthroat professional world, the gift of garment bags filled with designer clothing is like being outfitted with armor.
“This education, this profession, it’s a balance of torture and extreme satisfaction,” said Natalia Kutateladze, a mezzo-soprano from the country of Georgia, who this spring will sing a lead role in Hippolyte et Aricie by Jean-Philippe Rameau. She left with a knockout long black dress with a red satin crisscross sash by Lanvin. “For us, it’s Christmas today,” she said.