Kara Laricks with Broadway star Montego Glover at her presentation last week.

As New York shovels up the Fashion Week embers around town after the onslaught, The Observer still has a few loose ends. One thing we wanted to know in all the ruckus was how the new comers had fared.

Kara Laricks, the winner of NBC reality show Fashion Star, is certainly a new face in the crowded sea of designers. Under the tutelage design mentors Jessica Simpson, John Varvatos and Nicole Richie, Ms. Laricks convinced the buyers' judging panel from H&M, Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue that her creations were worthy of the $6m capsule collection award. The show was a hit: Nielsen TV Ratings Data reported 4.81 million viewers for the finale, and NBC has already renewed Fashion Star for a second season and begun casting. We caught up with Ms. Laricks after her first presentation at Runway@Pier 57 last week to get all the buzz about her début. Were her masculine-feminine-meets-1920s-Japanese matchbox looks a triumph or did she she fall flat?

What did it feel like to finally present your first bona fide fashion week presentation?

I felt vulnerable!  In the past, if my collection was not well received, I was under the protective wing of The Academy of Art University, NBC, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's, H&M ... this time, the pressure was all on me.  However, there was never any question as to whether or not I would continue designing post Fashion Star and I knew "sticking my neck out there" would be worth the risk no matter what the response. Now that my first collection has been shown at New York fashion week and the reviews are rolling in, I feel exhilarated, proud and accomplished. Can't wait for the next!

Any dramas or disasters leading up to the big day?

Of course - wouldn't be fashion without a little bit of drama ... one of my models was stuck at a Calvin Klein fitting until minutes before my presentation - thank goodness for my talented (and speedy) hair and makeup team.

What did you do to keep calm?

I am always amazed when people remark that I appear calm, as I am usually a ball of nerves on the inside. However, I instantly calm down when I pause and take a look around at all of the incredible people who support me.

So now that Fashion Star is over, what has been your biggest struggles?

Putting together my first collection hasn't been a steep learning curve, but a right angle. For the first time, I have had to figure out how to produce an entire line, secure PR, a venue, models and the list goes on. The biggest challenge is keeping my fans and consumers informed of the process. Fans of Fashion Star were used to seeing a garment one evening and buying it the following day.  In the "real" world, it takes six months to develop a collection, show the collection to buyers and take orders—then add on another six months for production and delivery to stores.  It's tough not to get the people what they want when they want it!

Are you still tight with the cast?

Absolutely! Nzimiro, Nikki, Sarah and Edmond were at my presentation, cheering me on. I also received well wishes from the rest of the cast that wasn't able to be there. I had no idea a reality competition would turn into real friends, real support and real dreams come true.

What’s one thing you absolutely hate about fashion week?

The fact that when I am presenting my own collection, I do not have time too see other designers' work—I am still catching up— so grateful for Style.com!

Ms. Pottasch, an art student who lives in Fort Greene, did not claim Heidi as a conscious inspiration. Nor did she cite Nicole Richie, Sienna Miller, Anne Hathaway, Mary-Kate Olsen, Scarlett Johansson or the countless other celebrities whose braids have been steadily proliferating all year. “I would say they’re Pippi Longstocking–style, but just not, like, up in the air,” said Ms. Pottasch, who fastened them atop her head when she was Frida Kahlo for Halloween. “I used to live in Spain and I’d wear them, and people would call me Pocahontas! They never even bothered to learn my actual name!”

Modern famous women are appropriating and experimenting with braids en masse this season, wearing the once-casual style to do errands in Hollywood, on the red carpet at the recent Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum and to parties downtown. “I’ve been doing a lot of braids lately,” said Louise O’Connor, a celebrity stylist who has worked with Beyoncé and Jessica Simpson and owns OC61, a salon on 61st Street. For the Met, she styled model Coco Rocha in four braids that criss-crossed at the back. “She had sent me a picture, she said it was Grecian, but the picture she actually sent me was, it seemed, more Renaissance, or like the Elizabethan times, a very romantic cross between curls and braids.”

The currently flame-haired Ms. Rocha’s look took an hour and a half to achieve—“It was a very intricate hairstyle,” Ms. O’Connor said—and she wore it with sparkly gold Isaac Mizrahi, vamping on the red carpet with the designer himself, surrounded by other imaginatively braided heads belonging to Tyra Banks, Jessica Alba and this leggy model or that.

Ms. O’Connor argued that this is not a Swiss Miss movement. “When you mention braids to people, they’re like, ‘I don’t want to look like Heidi,’” she said firmly. “They want something a little more glamorous, goddess-type.” The assistants at her salon, she added, have been wearing small side braids at the front of their hair, like Jennifer Aniston did for this year’s Oscars
and Lauren Conrad has been doing on The Hills. “Angelina Jolie wore braids in some movie,  also!” (The forthcoming Salt, which was recently filming in New York.) “And anybody that goes away to the islands, they come back with braids. Like that movie—is it 10? With Bo Derek?”

Dickey, a celebrity stylist who has worked with everyone from Michelle Obama to the singer Kelis and just styled a photo shoot involving braids for Self, cautioned wearers against the Bo look. “Not the most flattering,” he scoffed. “You don’t want your hairstyle to say, ‘Oh, she just came back from Club Med.’” (Still: Heidi Klum recently wore a full head of cornrows to renew her vows with Seal at a reportedly “white trash”–themed celebration. )

Done well, Dickey said, braids “have always been a fashion-forward way to wear your hair, particularly in New York”—perhaps because of the very incongruity of the rustic style on our concrete streets.

Teddi Cranford, a stylist at Bumble & Bumble downtown, agreed. She said she was seeing a lot of braids in New York several months ago, but that L.A. is just now catching on. “Hair kind of follows fashion,” she said, citing flowing, bohemian looks being sent down the runway by designers (many of whom have also featured braids, among them influential and decidedly non-bohemian Alexander Wang).

“There are a million different ways,” Ms. Cranford enthused of braids’ permutations. “When they get a cut, I’ll style them with a really natural blow-dry and then just do a cute little braid in the front, and it kind of spices things up a little bit. But I’ve seen women come in and they’ll get a big braid off to the side and then pin it back into a low chignon, a low bun, and then they’re going to put on their fancy dress and off they go!”

And for those of us who can no longer afford regular blowouts: “It lends itself to kind of being able to get out the door in a hurry and look formal and fabulous,” said Dickey.

Of course DIY Williamsburg lasses, glimpsed over the weekend throwing softballs in McCarren Park and whizzing by on bicycles with baskets, are totally bonkers for braids.

“My sisters take, like, 45 minutes to do their hair,” said Zita Thomas, 30, a comely brunet graphic designer cruising Berry Street on Memorial Day with two braids protruding from under a low-slung pageboy cap. “I could never do that. On a good day mine takes five minutes, and if my hair’s being an asshole, it takes close to seven.”

She called her look “a traditional plait” (pronounced correctly). “From when I was 14 to when I was 27, my hair was shorter than most boys’—in Williamsburg, at least,” she said. Three years ago, she started growing it out, and she planned eventually to donate it to Locks of Love, which provides hair to young chemo patients. Braids facilitated this process. “I don’t curl it, I don’t blow-dry, I can put it up in a bun, I can put it up Björk-style or I can plait it,” she said. “I don’t like my hair touching my ears.”

Ms. Thomas paused at length when asked to name what famous person might have inspired her style. She couldn’t actually think of one. (Didn’t Elliot on Scrubs have braids a few years ago, she wondered?) “To be honest, I am so far removed from the media,” she said with a sigh.

mbryan@observer.com

Nicole Richie put an end to her infamous feud with Rachel Zoe by hugging it out with the celebrity stylist at a party Ms. Zoe threw in Beverly Hills on Thursday. [WWD]

The "it" bag is over; the "it" shoe is in. [IHT] 

Lucky magazine has introduced an iPhone application that allows you to find anything from the magazine's shopping guides "near you." [NY Times]  

Prabal Gurung, design director of the now defunct Bill Blass fashion house, has announced that he will launch his own line for Fall 2009 on Feb. 12 at the FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea. [FWD]

French label Cacharel is the latest fashion house to cancel its spring Paris runway show in light of recent economic developments. [WWD]   

Michelle Obama has become a fashion muse for designers who want to market to middle-aged female shoppers. [WSJ]  

On Friday, Nicole Richie flew to Moscow for the opening of 16-year-old socialite's Kira Plastinina's (her father is a mogul of milk and juice!) latest store opening. [WWD]  

Emma Watson, the darling of the last Fashion Week, on her style: "Spending a whole day getting ready is ridiculous. I hate wearing an outfit that looks too put-together and perfect. I choose the things I wear myself because I'm such an OCD control freak." [Vogue UK] 

These are not the sorts of adorable headbands that Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) wears on CW's Gossip Girl. The headbands at the center of this conflict are the headbands that are worn straight on top of one's hair, in the style of a 1920s flapper meets 1970s hippie meets 2008 downtown "it" girl.  

But the West Coast's young Hollywood gals will have to compete with the East Coast's headband girls, who continue to enthusiastically wear the trend on a daily basis despite it reaching a tragic saturation point.

There is socialite Arden Wohl, who, as far as we can recall, debuted the trend back in 2005 laying claim to being the original headbanded girl. And there is filmmaker and trapeze artist Sarah Sophie Flicker, who can often be seen wearing decorative, bejeweled headbands. And the blond locks of British socialite, Williamsburg resident and Nylon magazine columnist Peaches Geldolf are often pushed up into a crown-like bulge on top of her head created by her selection of vintage headbands.  

“I wear headbands because I love the way hippie girls wore them in the ’60s,” Ms. Geldolf told the Daily Transom back in September. “I’ve been wearing them since I was 13 and saw an old photo of a hippie girl in Haight-Ashbury wearing one made of daisies.”

One of New York's headband girls has also been working on her own line of headbands that Ms. Barton's and Ms. Richie's respective lines will have to compete with. Ginny Branch, formerly a store clerk at Marc Jacobs' accessories store in the West Village, now a salesgirl for Maison Martin Margiela, has a headband line called A Year and a Day.

With others like Mary Kate Olsen, Lindsay Lohan, The Hills' Whitney Port and designer Charlotte Ronson wearing the headpiece on red carpets, the headband girls seem to be multiplying just when we thought the trend was coming to an end.

Billionaire Ron Perelman and ex-wife Patricia Duff will return to court next month, this time to discuss the order of protection daughter Caleigh filed against her mother this summer over "emotional abuse." [P6]

A Comme des Garcons for H&M dress is already on eBay (it's a size 8 with a starting bid of $750, in case you didn't make yesterday's opening). [The Cut] 

A characteristically humble Kanye West on his career: "I realize that my place and position in history is that I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade, I will be the loudest voice...It's me settling into that position of just really accepting that it's one thing to say you want to do it, and it's another thing to really end up being like Michael Jordan." [AP]

Stylist Rachel Zoe seems to have patched things up with former client Nicole Richie, who made the stylist a household name by referring to her as "raisin face" and "lettuce cup" on her Myspace page. [P6]

Damon Dash, who co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records and Rocawear, is pretty much broke. [NYDN]

An eight-months-pregnant Nicole Richie and her friend, the society disc jockeyess Samantha Ronson, volunteered at a Hollywood soup kitchen yesterday.

Jennifer Aniston recently attended her 20th high school reunion at Rudolf Steiner on the Upper East Side.

Gallerist Larry Gagosian and collector Adam Lindemann are involved in some crack-up over a Jeff Koons which we will ask Gillian Reagan to explain to us later.

Some bloggers don't believe a National Enquirer story claiming that Jake Gyllenhaal has proposed to Reese Witherspoon, but is that because it would mean Ms. Witherspoon was rebounding too fast or because it would put Mr. Gyllenhaal out of reach for The Gays?

Social chronicler David Patrick Columbia finds Thanksgiving to be pretty on the Upper East Side, but still managed to curl up with a copy of Jeanine Basinger's Hollywood book, The Star Machine. Quiet time for D.P.C.

Soft-porn downtown-society artist (photography) Terry Richardson and soft-porn downtown-society filmmaker Vincent Gallo crashed an Upper East Side dinner. But it was only a commercial for Belvedere Vodka. Honestly, it's time to move to Maine.

It was a beautiful Wednesday afternoon in early October, and all up and down Park Slope’s Seventh Avenue, women were busy being mommies. There were a few nannies, and four fathers stumbled about. But mostly it was mothers—a solid 50 or so—dutifully juggling life and babies while managing to look at once earthy and graceful, not a Britney among them.

This is the good life for a certain caste of New York woman, the aspirational endpoint as brought to you by Maclaren and Cookie magazine. But watching the parade of moms it was hard not to wonder, at what point did child-bearing become such an inescapable component of the New York woman’s dream? And at what point did New York City, historic refuge for the quirky, carefree and childless, turn into a Den of Procreation?

“It’s like a cult,” said a 34-year-old not-yet-parent named Alison who works in advertising and lives with her husband in Lower Manhattan. “It’s like a cult, complete with the required reading, the clubs, the gurus, the dues, the inclusion, the excommunication, the hierarchy.

“And the pressure,” she continued, “starts in the missionary position.”

Raised on the old baby-versus-career debates, women of Alison’s generation always anticipated that the big discussion would be about if they wanted kids, not whether they planned to have three or even four. Certainly when they chose to settle in New York, a town that regularly undershot the national birth rate and was proud of it, they had reason to expect that they were not on the soccer-mom track.

But sometime during the past few years, something strange happened to these historically reticent reproducers. They freaked out, got busy and turned themselves into mascots for the new maternity. In just five years, between 2000 and 2005, the number of children under five living in Manhattan ballooned more than 32 percent, according to Census figures.

It probably didn’t help that in 2006 the Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines recommending that all women of childbearing age be considered “pre-pregnant,” chomp folic acid and avoid smoking. In 2001, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine launched a “protect your fertility” campaign, complete with posters of baby bottles in the shape of quickly draining hourglasses. Meanwhile, the fashion industry has been churning out empire-waist dresses and billowy blouses that make even the skinniest ingenues look like expectant mothers.

Somewhere along the way, the powerful feminist idea that having children was a choice disappeared into the trousseau chest.

Over in France, a similar fertility push, which has helped give that country the highest birthrate in Europe, has sparked something of a backlash in the form of a best-selling book by a writer and psychoanalyst (naturalement!) named Corinne Maier. Titled No Kid: 40 Reasons Not to Have Children, the book is part angry manifesto, part modest proposal urging adults—and above all women—to remain “without descendants.”

“No children, no thank you,” writes Ms. Maier, 43, in the conclusion of No Kid, which is currently being shopped to American publishers. “Women, the future of our country depends on you. The last freedom is to say, ‘I prefer not to.’”

Ms. Maier has caused quite a commotion in France, not the least because she already has two children of her own. (Talk about giving Junior a complex!) But No Kid has raised some valid questions, like, why are people so eager for women (particularly white, nonimmigrant women) to have babies these days? And why, when they do, does it have to be “the most beautiful thing in the world?”

“For women it’s compulsory, you have to be delighted,” Ms. Maier told The Observer in a phone conversation. “We have to work hard, be perfect and be ready,” she added, to sacrifice everything to raise the perfect child.

But back here, in radical old New York, there has been little public discussion among pre-pregnants of the rising pressure to procreate. In this age of “mom”-inism, where success is grand but motherhood is holy, women who declare they don’t want kids are considered self-haters or throwbacks.

This worries veteran feminists like Gloria Steinem. “We’re certainly not in an O.K. place,” said Ms. Steinem, who herself chose not to have children and said she never regretted it. “Whether women can decide for themselves whether to have children or not is the single biggest component of our health, our economic status, our education, our ability to control our own lives.”

One might ask: When will we get our own backlash? In our brave new world, in which everyone from Nicole Richie to Curtis Sliwa’s quintagenarian sister is getting knocked up, no one is exempt from the baby squeeze. Fifty-five-year-old women who’ve never had kids now get told, “It’s not too late!”, while some gay men and women, suddenly surrounded by baby-happy friends, have now begun complaining about the pressure to reproduce.

“When did I wake up and become Bridget Jones?” asked Stephanie, a 37-year-old editor and member of No Kidding!, a social group for adults who, yep, don’t want kids. “I’ve had the experience of having two women not even want to date me because I don’t want to have kids.”

Molly Peacock, the poet and feminist, can relate. At 60, she has never had a child—in fact, she wrote a memoir called Paradise, Piece by Piece about her decision not to have a child—but she can still imagine the day when someone will nudge her in the ribs and wink, “There’s still another chance for you!”

“You can’t get out from under it,” she said. “I really can understand how a younger woman can just feel like this blanket’s been thrown over her head.”

“Even my sluttiest friends are having kids now,” said Alison, the pre-parent, “which is alarming.”

In her new book, The Terror Dream, the feminist Susan Faludi (also without child) argues that the procreation push is part of a creepy post-9/11 gender narrative, an extension of the ongoing, nationalist effort to promote hearth, home, and female fragility: “a concerted effort to promote this … idea that women would and should reproduce as a way of consoling the nation,” as she put it to The Observer.

Or maybe it’s just capitalism at work.

“I think that it’s just such a clear extension of affluence, that people can afford to have children become an extension of themselves,” said Janice Min, editor in chief of Us Weekly and the mother of two young children.

Ms. Min knows a thing or two about today’s fetus frenzy. Hollywood, after all, is one of its chief purveyors, a land in which everyone from 17-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes, who appeared heartbreaking and prepubescent in Whale Rider, to 45-year-old Marcia Cross of Desperate Housewives seems to be sporting a belly.

Forget Katherine Hepburn, who famously chose not to have children in order to focus on her career. These days, it’s pregnancy that earns an actress ink.

“It’s almost un-American at this point to say you don’t want children, especially from an image perspective,” said Ms. Min, who spoke to The Observer the day her magazine broke the news of Jennifer Lopez’s pregnancy. “It’s almost like saying you’re a communist.”

Asked about her magazine’s own role in this phenomenon, the editor cited audience appetite. “There just seems to be this endless, bottomless desire to see celebrity offspring,” she said. The postfeminists of today, she said, no longer sees kids as “some sort of personal setback.”

Certainly it’s not a bad thing that motherhood is no longer stigmatized. But it all smacks a bit of the 1950’s—albeit spiffed up with Gucci baby carrier, Juicy maternity jeans and wooden toys from Germany. “I think there are ways in which these Bush years feel like the Eisenhower years,” mused Ms. Peacock, the poet. Then she offered a ray of hope.

“Of course, that’s the generation of women who produced Betty Friedan,” she said, “the generation who produced The Feminine Mystique.”

Models emerged for their walk around the double U-shaped runway and Wintour’s head turned to glance at Max and wife Lubov’s designs. If she liked the oufit, her eyes—hidden behind dark black shades as always—followed the models as they made the bend around the center aisle. If she didn’t, the pout on her face intensified and she stared straight ahead, waiting for the next flowing gown to emerge. The ratio of pouts to pleasure was about equal.

"OOOOH, your dress!" squealed my friend Liz. "Let's go see it." she said to me after I revealed this damning information to her on the phone.

No thanks.

My dress and I are avoiding one another right now like Nicole Ritchie and Paris Hilton. Don't get me wrong: I'm still madly in love with my dress and can't wait for our tearful reunion. But I just want to make sure this reunion happens after I finish getting the rest of this junk out of my trunk.

Apparently I only need three weeks or so for alterations, so I've got a solid month left of "de-junking." Wish me luck...I seriously need it.