Fashion Week Isn’t Dead: Evie’s Editor Had a Blast in New York. We Had One in West Hollywood.

Every season someone declares fashion week dead. Every season the shows go on anyway. Brittany Hugoboom, founder and editor in chief of Evie Magazine, answered the obituary writers better than most this fall. She opened her Sept. 26 Substack essay with a line we’d frame:

Yes, I know fashion week was a couple weeks ago and I don’t care that it’s “dead” because I had a blast.

Brittany Hugoboom, Vanity & Virtue, Sept. 26, 2026 (opening line of a paywalled post)

What she covered

• Alice + Olivia at NYFW. In “Inside Alice + Olivia’s Wonderland at NYFW” (Evie, Sept. 11, 2026), she covered the label’s Sept. 10 presentation on the first official day of New York Fashion Week, which Evie describes as turning the Upper East Side into “a maximalist, ultra-feminine wonderland.” She also admits she started toward Midtown before her taxi driver pointed her north to 64th and Park. Honest fashion writing includes the wrong turns.
• Runway prep as a profession. Her Substack piece “The Model Body Is Back” (paywalled) is about the prep economy around the Victoria’s Secret show: trainers, classes and treatments. Evie followed with a first-person piece by trainer Justin Gelband (Jan. 8, 2026), who writes that as the show approaches, the models’ preparation becomes similar to training for the Olympics. We’re not going to talk about anyone’s body. We will say this: treating runway work as a discipline, not an accident, is the right frame.
• The Victoria’s Secret casting debate. Covered in our companion piece.

Our take

Fashion week isn’t dead. It moved. The big houses still run New York, but the energy in 2026 is spread across dozens of independent weeks, and Los Angeles has a lot of them. We spent Oct. 16 and 17 in the photo pit at The Bureau Fashion Week at The Lot Studios in West Hollywood. Eleven designers across two nights, from Idaho formalwear to Beverly Hills couture to swim. Nobody in that room thought fashion was over.

Hugoboom’s best instinct is the one most fashion media lost: go to the show, describe the room, have an opinion, and make it fun. That’s not a conservative or a liberal idea. It’s just journalism with taste. Where we’d add to her coverage: the independent shows deserve the same attention as the Upper East Side. Same craft, same nerves backstage, far fewer cameras.

Here’s ours. Day 1 and Day 2 galleries, every look credited to its designer: The Bureau Fashion Week LA, October 2026.

Brittany Hugoboom’s articles and posts are hers; we link to them so you can read her in full. Quotes are short excerpts for commentary. Paywalled posts were not read past their public preview.