Zoe Dubno

Zoe Dubno writes about fashion, beauty, and contemporary femininity for New York Magazine’s culture verticals, treating style as a language of power, aspiration, and self-performance. Her work also spans major magazines and literary journals, and her fiction shares the same interest in how people stage themselves in social and professional life. Across reported features, essays, and criticism, she brings a sharp, comic voice to the anxieties and ambitions that gather around clothes, bodies, and taste.

Fashion, beauty and self-performance

Dubno’s fashion and beauty writing often starts with the minute details of routines and products and expands outward into the psychology of self-presentation. In a Cut commission on “MAXXXimalist” beauty routines, she examines the emergent culture of highly elaborate regimens, using their excess and labor as a way to talk about desire, control, and the pressures of contemporary femininity. That piece illustrates her tendency to treat beauty not as a set of tips but as a performance of identity and status, attentive to the time, money, and emotional investment these rituals demand.

Her coverage for The Strategist further extends this approach, using shopping and product choice as an entry point into taste, aspiration, and how people curate their public selves. Rather than simply endorsing items, she writes in a mode that foregrounds the stories around them, situating fashion and beauty objects in the larger ecosystems of work, nightlife, and urban social life. The same interest in self-performance that animates her fiction underpins her fashion beat, giving her coverage a reflective, critical edge that goes beyond trend-spotting.

Girlboss culture and aspirational work

In “My Weekend With 100 Girlbosses,” Dubno embeds herself in a Girlboss-branded gathering and writes from inside a world of corporate feminism and entrepreneurial self-help. She uses the language, dress codes, and staged enthusiasm of the event to show how empowerment is packaged, sold, and rehearsed, paying close attention to the aesthetics of slideshows, merch, and networking rituals. Her reporting balances scene-setting with close dialogue, allowing readers to hear how attendees talk about success, failure, and branding themselves as products.

This strand of her work focuses less on individual style and more on the collective choreography of aspirational work culture—the Instagram-friendly spaces, panel wardrobes, and branded slogans that define Girlboss-era professionalism. By keeping the tone funny but unsparing, she surfaces the tension between genuine ambition and the commodified optimism that surrounds it, making the piece useful for stories that touch corporate feminism, influencer entrepreneurship, or how fashion and branding shape ideas of “having it all.”

Shopping, taste and cultural criticism

Dubno’s contributions to The Strategist show her using shopping as a framework for cultural criticism, treating clothes, beauty products, and other consumer goods as evidence of broader social trends. The work sits at the intersection of fashion, lifestyle, and culture, with an emphasis on how people use objects to project taste, signal belonging, or craft a persona. Her tone in these pieces is conversational but sharply observant, making room for both practical detail and a wider reading of what these purchases say about the moment.

Fiction and a scathing, funny voice

Dubno’s novel Happiness and Love takes place over the course of a single dinner party, unfolding as a book-length internal monologue in which the narrator is trapped among a circle of former art-world friends she hoped never to see again. The work explores “the strangeness of self-performance and the disquieting way that bourgeois instincts corrode the ability to grieve,” establishing her preoccupation with the performance of taste, status, and feeling. Vogue has described the book as a “wickedly funny” debut, underscoring the blend of satire and emotional seriousness that characterizes her voice.

That same sensibility runs through her journalism: she writes about fashion and beauty with the comic timing of a novelist and the critical distance of an essayist, interested in how people costume their lives as much as how they dress their bodies. Beyond The Cut and The Strategist, her work appears in publications such as Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Vogue, and The Nation, often in pieces that connect style and surface to deeper questions of class, grief, and ambition. For anyone working on stories about fashion culture, beauty rituals, corporate feminism, or the performance of taste, Dubno engages these themes as both reporter and critic, with a voice that is sharp, funny, and attentive to the social stakes of style.