Evie Magazine’s Brittany Hugoboom Wants Women to Have It All (With Some Caveats for Vaccines, Hormones, and Abortions)

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 ambitious 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.

Brittany Hugoboom was born Brittany Martinez, one of four siblings in a Catholic family. Her parents were college sweethearts, and no one gets divorced in her family. They moved around for her father’s job in banking, but her adolescent years were largely spent in Southlake, Texas, an affluent suburb of Dallas, where each Saturday she would go to Barnes & Noble to read magazines but also the Roman poet Virgil. She remembers the sitcoms of the era, like The King of Queens, featuring unhappy marriages where the man is a buffoon and the woman complains constantly.

But she loved manga and studied martial arts. She was also a gamer (her favorite is The Last of Us). She thinks manga and video games and anime shaped her feelings about masculinity and femininity more than anything else. She was good enough at gaming that she would battle people for eight hours a day at tournaments. “My husband’s friends used to joke, ‘You have to get Brittany pregnant again. It’s the only time we can beat her,’” she says.

She saw giving birth as similar to a martial arts event or playing a video game. “I just thought of it as like a battle,” she says. But that same woman was worried she’d say something mean to her husband in the heat of labor. “[He said,] ‘Why are you thinking about me?’ He’s always, like, putting me first. And I think that’s why it’s so easy for me to love him,” she says.

He grew up one of eight kids to parents in Memphis who worked as naturopaths and homeschooled their kids. Brittany and Gabriel’s own children have not been vaccinated. She’s not sure if they will homeschool their two-year-old and four-year-old daughters. Instead of paying for childcare, one of her siblings or her husband’s help out, often one coming and staying with them. “We’re very fortunate in that way. I understand most people don’t have big families like that,” she says.

She remembers feeling bored at the private Catholic schools she attended. She loves the old Catholic churches in New York, loves mass in Latin, and is against abortion. But she thinks of her beliefs as not entirely sticking to anyone’s proscribed doctrine. “I have a lot of complicated thoughts, I guess, on evolution,” she says, referring to my question of whether she considers herself strictly creationist.

Hugoboom doesn’t seem to find any inherent issue with her own beliefs often being contradictory, or at least convenient. She voted for Trump in the last election, but she doesn’t envy his wife. “I would not want to be married to Donald Trump,” she says. “I prefer a different type of marriage.” She didn’t vote for Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor because of his issues with women. Instead she liked both Zohran Mamdani and Curtis Sliwa (the latter reminded her of someone who could be in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York), but forgot to register and didn’t vote for anyone.

“I do think there’s never been a better time for women to have it all than probably now,” says Hugoboom. “In the sense of what we can do now with social media, even with men and even crypto and stuff, like nobody had this 20 years ago where you can work from your phone.” In fact, in the early days of Evie, they had the editorial content divided into times of a woman’s life: the student, the professional, and the homemaker. “So it’s for the girl in college; the girl who’s working, probably in the city; the homemaker in the rural area,” she says. “We had articles on stocks and stuff…. We self-funded in the beginning. So we were like, Well, no one really likes to read this on our site. Forbes and other sites can do it better.” So does that mean she made the decision to focus more on the homemaker over the students and professionals? “Yeah,” she says, nodding her head. They narrowed in on what the Evie audience responded to.

Hugoboom is not some secret progressive. She understands the pressure put on appearances, although stops short of saying what—if anything—she’d get done cosmetically. She does think someone’s life could be changed by a nose job. “I mean, that can really make someone’s life different.” But when it comes to hormones, she takes a hard line, including for trans people (some of whom she says are friends). “It’s the synthetic hormone thing. I don’t think that that’s good for you long-term,” she says. “I also like gendered spaces. Like, I like going to an all-girls Pilates class. I like when my husband goes to a male barber. But I counter: If she thinks a nose job could change someone’s life, think of what hormones could do. “They’re just…I think they’re.…There hasn’t been enough decades of research into them, and I don’t think long-term that it will be as healthy. But that’s kind of my main issue with it, more so than anything else.”

If Hugoboom’s views and the magazines are one and the same, or if her self-presentation is one that’s more intentional, she seems to still be working it out. But her readers seem to respond to the way she markets a woman’s value.

“I’m Michelle Ivana, but it’s my middle name, not like Trump,” says an Evie reader when we are introduced in a photo studio in Bushwick in December. Hugoboom has planned a photo shoot of readers. There is a mood board on one wall with models in pastel miniskirts in a ’90s Versace campaign. No one seems to be wearing—or borrowing from—designer brands. Hugoboom said it was the hired stylist who brought in the clothes, which look a little more Miss Universe than haute couture.

Hugoboom was wearing a floral-printed black dress and combat boots. She met the fans in fairly normal online ways; one did a TikTok Hugoboom liked about French versus American grocery stories. Her manner with the models is a bit mother hen.

“Can you fix the hair a little bit?” calls Hugoboom to a hairstylist, asking the photographer to pause for a moment. There is a guy holding a fan blasting the hair around and a girl-boss-goes-spring-break soundtrack. Fergie’s “My Humps” is playing, followed by Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious.”

“You look amazing, like a ’90s supermodel,” she says to Kaylee McArthur, a 25-year-old in town from Toronto whose day job is in embroidery and screen printing. She has been married for two years but with her husband for 11 years. “He introduced me to Evie back in 2020,” she says. “I was struggling with my identity, and I was having a hard time finding a magazine I aligned with. It looked fun and girly and had great advice about being true to yourself and authentic.” A 20-year-old reader named Gabriela Ortega is a former competitive tennis player turned model from Charlotte. She met Hugoboom at an event last year at the Paley Media Council. “I enjoy how Evie celebrates culture, ambition, and femininity,” says Ortega. “Femininity isn’t the opposite of ambition; I think it’s one of its purist forms.”