Burnt Hair and Soft Power: A Night Out With Evie Magazine

Just after 8:00 pm on Sunday night, Evie Magazine’s first live event was finally getting started. The women’s magazine, which was founded in 2019 and once described itself as a “conservative Cosmo,” welcomed eager fans to celebrate the publication, generally, and its new issue, specifically, during New York Fashion Week at the Standard Hotel’s Boom in Chelsea.

Guests lined up outside, hugging fur coats around formal dresses, as hosts scanned a list for their names. One blonde woman begged for access to the VIP section; an event planner ran downstairs to tell her coworkers that someone’s hair had caught on fire. Upstairs, women crowded the entrance for the chance to be photographed against a larger-than-life plastic Evie Magazine cover that declared, “Welcome to the Romantic Era.” (The other cover lines: “‘Your secret feminine power,” “12 ways to make him swoon,” and “Feminine fashion we love: corsets, dresses, & drama.”)

The party was hosted by Brittany Hugoboom, the editor in chief, and her cofounder and husband Gabriel Hugoboom. The invitation billed it as a “celebration of romance & beauty,” with attendees promised an “immersive night of live music, gorgeous visuals, captivating performances, delicious food and drinks, and a secret reveal.”

Aside from the lingering stench of burnt hair and the prominent “EVIE” projected above the wraparound gold bar, it was hard to distinguish the event from any other party, which certainly seemed like the point. There was virtually no overt mention of politics, and the kind of conservatism in the air had more to do with Sydney Sweeney than abstinence.

But Evie, which critics call “alt-right,” is inherently political. Evie has been soundly embraced by different corners of the Republican Party: Candace Owens, Steve Bannon, and Brett Cooper—a conservative commentator who attended the party—all champion Evie. The magazine itself, meanwhile, traffics in conspiracy theories, shares anti-vaccine content, dispenses tradwife inspo (remember Ballerina Farm?), rejects “modern” feminism, and pushes an app founded by the Hugobooms called 28, where users log information about their periods to calculate their menstrual cycle. Advertisements for the app, which was initially funded in part by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, run next to articles that criticize hormonal birth control and push women to get off the pill. (Brittany Hugoboom told The New York Times that she pitched Thiel, one of many conservatives concerned about declining US birthrates, on the “fertility crisis.”)

If you think all of this sounds more or less like what you’d get from any right-wing media enterprise these days, you’d be correct. What distinguishes Evie, aside from its unusual soft-focus photography of glamorously dressed women milking cows, is that this sort of content runs alongside listicles titled, for example, “7 Questions to Ask Early If You Want a Serious Relationship” or “How to Dress Like Olivia Dean on a Budget.” It’s a classic example of soft power in action—just as the appeal of mid-century Hollywood films wasn’t necessarily the anti-Communist messaging but the glitz and glamour, the strength of Evie’s politics are in its pretense that it doesn’t have any.

To many attendees, that is the goal not just of the party, but of Evie in general. “That’s how we shift the culture,” said one attendee, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of her career. She credited Evie with the beginning of a Republican cultural revival. “We’ve been so policy-focused that we lost the culture, and we need to take that back if we want to win.” That’s what made this party notable. Evie’s conservatism-without-conservatism messaging has long drawn attention (including profiles by numerous publications). But now, going into a consequential midterm election in which the polls look grim for the GOP, that messaging seems less a curiosity than a necessity. Here at least was proof of the concept that Evie-ism can make a compelling backdrop for young women unsure about what the Republican movement means to them.