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.’