Abigail Buzbee and Ryan Hunt did not set out to make a magazine. The Seattle-based editor and art director were interested in the intersection of fashion and narrative — how clothing functions as storytelling, how the material world carries emotional weight — and the thing they built to explore those ideas simply turned out to be a magazine. Novella borrows its name and its structure from literary form: each annual-ish issue attempts to weave a single, coherent narrative through its pages, compact and pointed like the fiction it takes after.
The first issue, themed Romance, was small and deliciously pink: 136 pages, softcover with otabind binding, offset-printed in black and white with a colour gallery at its centre. Contributors reflected on fashion as it relates to romance — the cultural symbolism of the wedding dress, the role of clothing in romance fiction, the nostalgia of garments from a not-too-distant past. Stack Magazines named it one of the ten best independent fashion magazines in the world. What caught their eye was the design: interspersed throughout are pages from a Katherine Stone romance novel, with certain words cut out by hand and printed on the page behind, turning the act of reading into something intimate and puzzling.
Novella also operates as a gallery and stockist of fashion-adjacent objects and independent publications, blurring the line between editorial content and wearable design. The approach is deliberately slow — publishing when the story is ready rather than on a rigid calendar. In a fashion media landscape dominated by either glossy excess or lo-fi zines, Novella occupies a thoughtful middle ground: literary in ambition, handmade in execution, and patient enough to wait for the right story.
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