As Carrie Bradshaw proved when she became fashion roadkill on Season 4 of Sex and the City, there is perhaps nothing cooler or more charming to fashion industry professionals than a literary outsider. Happiness and Love author Zoe Dubno boldly picked up that mantle this week, walking the runway at Rachel Scott’s debut collection for Proenza Schouler.
Dubno was far from the only non-professional model at New York Fashion Week (Wes Gordon cast artists including Rachel Feinstein, Ming Smith and Amy Sherald for Carolina Herrera’s fall 2026 show; Scott also sent psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster down her runway), hinting at a New York fashion future in which the creatives who help make the city great are skillfully deployed to make collections feel all the more lived-in and vibrant. This week, Vogue spoke to Dubno about working with Scott, consulting her friend Zoe Latta for regular-person-goes-runway advice, overcoming her stage fright, and the Proenza poncho that captured her heart. Read the full interview below.
Vogue: How did the opportunity to walk in the Proenza show first come up for you?
Zoe Dubno: I got an email from the casting director that was literally just, ‘Hello, we are casting the Proenza runway show for this season, are you interested in walking?’ When I got that email, I took a screenshot of it and I sent it to my mom being like, ‘Do they mean as a novelist, or…?’ I grew up in New York, and all of the really rich girls had their moms buying them Proenza bags. I remember that as being sort of the Fashion’s Night Out era of New York.
Oh, yeah, there was nothing cooler.
When they emailed me, I kind of thought, ‘It’s fine, they might ask me to do it, but they’re not going to end up wanting me in the end, so it’s fine. I won’t really have to do it.’ I’m not a performer, you know? Once I start doing a public event, I enjoy it, but I get really bad stage fright, so this was really a thing for me to be like, ‘Okay, I don’t have to be a chicken and say no. I can be brave and say yes, and it will be fine.’
They asked me to come in for a casting, and I’m friends with a couple of fashion-y people, so I asked Zoe Latta—who casts normal people all the time, including two of my good friends—if she has them come to the office full of models. She was like, It won’t be that, and then I went, and it was actually so funny, because I wasn’t sure where to go, and then I saw a six-foot-tall blonde and followed her because I was like, okay, she knows. We got to the office, and she wrote her name and agency down on this piece of paper; she knew exactly what to do, so I wrote my name down in my smallest handwriting next to hers, and then the casting assistant was like ‘Can whoever just signed in add their headshot and agency?’ I was like, ‘Oh my God…I’m a novelist. I’m sorry.’
What was it like working with Rachel Scott?
Rachel is such a completely lovely and amazing person. The stylist, Marika-Ella Ames, was there too. They’re just two super-smart, funny women who completely understood how to make the whole thing less awkward for me. Proenza is an iconic New York brand, and Rachel is an incredibly talented designer who is Jamaican and brings an incredible point of view, both about fashion and about what makes this city that is made up of immigrants so great.
Tell me a little about working with a walking coach to get your runway strut just right.
They had me come back a couple of days after the casting to walk back and forth for an hour and a half in heels with this runway model coach, who was so great. She had me hold these water bottles so I would stop swinging my arms, and was giving me some serious psychological coaching. She could tell I’m not necessarily thinking ‘Wow, I’m excited to launch my runway-model career.’ I definitely watched America’s Next Top Model growing up, but I never practiced the walk. I’m not a dancer, I’m not somebody who uses my body in an elegant way, so it was very useful to have someone be like: this is how you’re going to walk confidently, this is how you’re going to take it seriously, this is how you’re going to put your shoulders back. It was very My Fair Lady.
Can I get some details on the day-of-show glam?
The hair was mostly ponytails, because what they were going for on the mood board was kind of a Gena Rowlands Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, powerful-woman-who’s-having-a-little-bit-of-a-hard-time thing. The ponytails were slicked back but then a little messed up, which was quite quick. JINSoon did my nails, and the nail artist said that it was time-saving for her that she didn’t have to file mine because I had already bitten my nails down. The makeup artists were really lovely; I don’t usually wear that much makeup, but the way that they did my makeup, I was like, ‘I wish I could do this.’ They gave me skin that was like a baby angel’s, to the point where I was saying I looked like Bryan Johnson, the bio-hacking guy.
What piece did you most want to take home from the collection?
I really loved all of the black-and-white pieces with big white buttons; some of them were almost like grommets, which was very cool. There was also this black wool poncho. I would normally never think to wear a poncho cape, but I really loved it.
