Vivian Wilson has gotten pretty good at playing the rebel. Now she’d like a shot at playing a villain.

A “slightly unhinged” one, actually. “Sadistic,” even. The model told WWD on Thursday evening at Petit Ermitage in West Hollywood that she’d love to play a “power fantasy villain,” although her friends aren’t convinced she could pull it off.

“One day I will be doing it,” she said.

Wilson was at the hotel celebrating The Gorgon, the final chapter of Awe Inspired’s fall 2026 Nocturne collection, which features the model portraying three mythological figures: Inanna, Persephone and Medusa. Of the three, it’s Medusa she connects with most.

The snake-haired figure gets a pretty bad rap, according to Wilson, who thinks people tend to overlook the more complicated parts of her mythology.

“I feel like people think she’s like inherently evil when she’s not,” she said. “But also, she does turn bitches into stone, and I respect that.”

As for playing rebellious characters herself, Wilson acknowledged that it’s becoming something of a pattern. “I would like to venture outside of that, but I don’t mind it,” she said.

And she’s certainly had plenty of opportunities to experiment with her image. Since making her runway debut in September 2025, Wilson’s fashion résumé has grown to include appearances for Gucci and Alexander McQueen, along with a Savage X Fenty campaign and Desigual’s anti-AI “Born to Disobey” campaign, in which she walked a malfunctioning robot on a leash.

Her personal style has changed along the way, too.

Wilson said she’s become more daring and adventurous with her clothing choices, particularly now that she has an audience paying attention to what she wears.

“It’s my style, but amplified,” she explained, adding that her fashion sense has also become “a bit more mature.”

Awe Inspired cofounder and chief executive officer Max Johnson first connected with Wilson after the model wore one of the brand’s necklaces to a Teen Vogue summit.

“The words she said at this thing were very poignant,” Johnson told WWD at the celebration. “I wrote her a note.”

The conversation eventually turned into a collaboration, with Wilson involved in the campaign’s creative development from the early stages, including reviewing sketches.

“In ways it was crafted around her,” Johnson said.

According to Johnson, Wilson was particularly fascinated by Inanna, also known as Ishtar, whose mythology includes associations with gender fluidity. “Vivian was really drawn to that story,” Johnson said.

The campaign’s fashion was a collaborative effort, too, with clothing sourced from four independent, female-led labels that Wilson had previously worn or that Awe Inspired had worked with.

The collection also reflects a shift Johnson has been seeing among the brand’s customers. Awe Inspired, which he founded with his mother, Jill Johnson, a three-time cancer survivor, originally grew out of the idea of creating meaningful jewelry for people who had overcome difficult experiences.

Johnson described the original concept as “jewelry as a vehicle for meaning,” with the brand’s goddess pendants conceived as badges of honor for people who had survived something.

More recently, customers have been gravitating toward darker mythological figures, something Johnson said helped shape Nocturne.

“Right now, like all the energy seems to be about reclaiming the darkness and shadow work,” he said, explaining that the collection grew out of a couple of years of observing which figures resonated most with customers.

The Thursday night celebration brought that darker aesthetic to Petit Ermitage, where guests including Reese Witherspoon’s daughter Ava Phillippe, Mette, Empress Of and Langley Fox Hemingway gathered for cocktails, tarot readings and a candlelit ceremony.

Nearly everyone wore black, with plenty of tattoos, webbed, sheer textured layers and sunglasses worn well after dark. The whole scene had a slightly early-aughts feel, right down to a tray of cigarettes. Espresso martinis and mezcal cocktails with appropriately dramatic names were served as music that sounded like macabre bossa nova wafted through the air before Anima Mundi, who owns an eponymous apothecary in Venice, led guests through a guided meditation all about embracing different aspects of each goddess.

As for Wilson, she’s already thinking about what comes next, although she’s keeping the details to herself for now.

“I have some ideas floating around my head,” she teased.

And while her fashion career has moved quickly, she’s not particularly interested in planning out every step.

“I’m a very spontaneous person, so I don’t even know what’s coming,” she said. “I keep myself on my own toes, whatever that means.”