Such is the world of Evie, the magazine founded by Hugoboom, a former model with big brown eyes and pillowy lips that would look appropriate on the cover of a romance novel. At Cafe Cluny, her hyperfeminine style–she’s always gravitated to dresses, she says–is on display with a slinky, décolletage-oriented dress and long, wavy hair.
Her business partner is her husband, Gabriel Hugoboom, who she met when they were both 18-year-olds at University of Dallas. Today they are both 34-year-old residents of Midtown Manhattan, where they moved a year ago from Florida, and parents to two toddler girls. He’s CEO and handles operations; she oversees editorial. Evie has a staff of 12 people, all women save for Hugoboom’s assistant, who is a man.
The couple also own 28, a wellness app for menstrual cycles backed by Peter Thiel’s Thiel Capital, and Sundress.co, which carries their Raw Milkmaid Dress. (Both have been advertisers in Evie.) “Sometimes people are like, what are they doing? Because it just feels very out there, but we kind of merge the more liberal health world with a kind of more conservative relationship world,” says Hugoboom. Evie is for the kinds of women she knows, who were the first to go off the Pill because of fear around hormones, but who shopped at Erewhon and wore Reformation—MAHA before the movement had a name.
According to a representative, the brand gets 175 million views per month on its digital articles and videos. And over 600K followers on social media, with 285K on Instagram, where it fits seamlessly into the digital ecosystem awash in performances of womanhood waiting to be algorithmized. Evie’s Substack, which is less than a year old, has almost 200K subscribers and recently got as high as number three in Rising in Culture. Nor is this an entirely heartland phenomenon, its biggest audiences lie in the country’s largest biggest cities. “I have a huge love for America. Like, I love California, I love New York, I love Texas, I love Miami,” says Hugoboom.
She certainly understands the way political and media ecosystems intersect. Hugoboom has been compared to Phyllis Schlafly, the ambitiously anti-feminist who campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1960s. But Hugoboom seems, to me, a bit more like the provocateur Camille Paglia. Hugoboom has recently hired her first publicist (recommended by Brett Cooper, a conservative YouTuber; Candace Owens and Stephen Bannon are fans of Evie as well) and is recording our conversation at the same time I do. The only time that’s ever happened to me is with politicians, Fortune 500 CEOs, or people who are very nervous about how they will be quoted. She doesn’t seem anxious about anything at all. She’s chatty and appears comfortable in every way, in her own skin and in her own views. Last year, when The New York Times profiled her, they wrote that she interpreted feminism as encouraging “women to ‘be just like men’ to succeed in corporate fields. Such messaging, she says, has made women anxious, lonely and unfulfilled.” I asked, as she sipped her coffee, what have people gotten wrong about her, or about Evie, a publication known to some as the tradwife magazine? “That I don’t want women to work,” Hugoboom says. And then she laughs.
Marisa Meltzer
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