Yola Mzizi

Yola Mzizi covers how clothes express identity, power and everyday behaviour, tracing the way fashion moves between runways, red carpets and ordinary streets at The New York Times. Her work sits where style meets consumer habits, pop culture, sports, business, the internet and personal identity, making trends legible through the people who design, sell and wear them. She is a fashion and style reporter on the Styles desk and a member of the 2025–2026 Times Fellowship class, having joined the paper in 2025.

Before arriving at the masthead, she reported on consumer trends and the business strategies behind them at The Business of Fashion. She wrote about how Gen Z and Gen Alpha shop, and how luxury, beauty, sustainability and retail respond to those generations, with bylines in CNN, STITCH Magazine and North By Northwestern. That background feeds into her current coverage, which treats clothes as a business, a cultural language and a set of daily choices rather than just objects on a rack.

Fashion as Everyday Behaviour

Mzizi’s recurring Fashion Chatter column focuses on small, telling shifts in how people dress and shop, using short reported pieces to show how style habits reflect wider cultural moods. She has examined a Parisian brand’s leather notebooks that function as status symbols online and off, unpacking how a simple accessory becomes social currency.

In other installments she has followed the rise of vintage Lululemon and secondhand activewear, linking nostalgia for pre-social-media fitness culture with the booming resale economy.

She has written about underwear marketed as wellness products, questioning why a start-up ties boxers and briefs to health and what that framing tells consumers. Pieces on body hair used in fashion imagery, Ivy League style’s darker undertones and a 94-year-old working model extend the same interest in how the visuals of dress encode age, class, taste and attention-seeking.

Beyond the column, she looks closely at how younger consumers play with spectacle and joy in everyday clothing, such as in a feature on bedazzling and “whimsymaxxing,” where Gen Z embraces crystals, gems and sparkles to inject delight into ordinary life. She has explored what she calls “cringe” in a piece on climbing “Cringe Mountain” with Gen Z, charting how self-conscious, awkward aesthetics become part of a generational style language.

A reported story on the confusing iPhone pocket in a fashion collaboration breaks down why an odd design choice is intentional, treating a single pocket as a lens on how tech and fashion negotiate function and image.

Red Carpets, Sports and Spectacle Dressing

Mzizi often uses red carpets and sports events as stages to show how fashion performs visibility and status.

In a feature on bras worn as tops at the MTV Video Music Awards and fashion week runways, she traces the “almost naked” look across celebrities and designers, asking what this shape of exposure signals in a cycle of constant visual spectacle. She has cataloged “10 Unforgettable Looks From Wimbledon,” focusing on spectators’ head scarves, double-breasted suits and leather waistcoats to show how tennis whites on court push bolder experimentation into the stands. Her coverage of a Knicks guard’s braids and on-court style similarly treats sports as part of the fashion system, where athletic performance and personal image intertwine.

On the red carpet, she has followed what happens after a major gown makes waves at an awards ceremony, examining how a dress created in a pinch can transform a designer’s career prospects.

A profile of a wig maker behind Hollywood illusions shows how unseen craftspeople shape the looks that define film and television. She has also written about the debate around ancient Iranian jewelry worn by Zendaya, exploring how a pair of earrings linked to an artifact raises questions about heritage, ownership and celebrity styling.

In a broader feature on Ralph Lauren and “The Gilded Age,” she connects images of Black affluence and aristocracy to the way fashion sells aspirational narratives about race and class.

Heat, Comfort and Service-Oriented Style

Alongside culture pieces, Mzizi produces practical service journalism that treats comfort as part of style, especially in extreme weather.

In a guide on how to stay and look cool in a heat wave, she offers advice on fabrics and cuts that help people manage high temperatures without relinquishing personal expression. A street-style report on how New Yorkers dressed during a heat wave observes crop tops, World Cup gear and aloha shirts, noting how fans, holiday references and local habits show up in outfits even under heat warnings. Her coverage of culottes - in both a reported feature and a TimesVideo explainer - follows the deceptive shorts that read as skirts, explaining their history and why they solve contemporary style dilemmas around mobility, modesty and trend.

She also contributes to round-ups like “The Best Clothing Stores in New York,” where she helps map the shops that keep the city’s fashion culture vibrant. These pieces combine service value with taste and context, guiding readers through choices while situating each recommendation within the city’s larger style ecosystem. Across this work, she treats dressing for weather, movement and budget as fully part of fashion, not a separate, lesser concern.

Industry, Emerging Voices and Status Symbols

Mzizi regularly highlights designers, brands and media shifts that reshape the fashion landscape.

She has profiled Ashlynn Park as a rising star winning over the fashion elite, tying back-to-back awards to the designer’s growing influence and to how institutions anoint new names. In pieces that link Levi’s and Barbour collaborations, new winter coats and store openings, she charts how heritage labels and fresh retail concepts respond to changing consumer expectations. Her coverage of Teen Vogue’s website folding into Vogue.com shows how digital consolidation affects youth-focused fashion media and the visibility of independent brands.

Other Fashion Chatter entries and features follow a podcaster obsessed with clothes, the Met’s next fashion blockbuster, and how “Emily in Paris” and its move to Rome remap a city’s image through television and tourism, underscoring her attention to how media reimagines real places. Across runway reports, factory-floor visits, protests and red carpet coverage, she keeps the link between industry structures and individual style choices in view, showing how business decisions filter down into what ends up in closets.