By Benjamin-Emile Le Hay 9/17/12 4:44pm

After the Runway

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

Fashion Star Winner Kara Laricks on Surviving Fashion 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! Read More

By Alexandria Symonds 9/15/10 6:47pm

Parties

What Does Heaven Look Like to Terence Koh?

At the 10th-anniversary party for Style.com last night, it seemed statement jackets were the order of the evening: immediately upon entering the party, we ran across the artist Terence Koh, who was wearing an immaculate white one with befeathered shoulders. He looked a bit like an art-world angel — and he informed The Observer that Read More

By Meredith Bryan 12/02/08 5:04pm

In Tough Times, Try Tortoise: The Not-So-New Neutral

Call it the Year of the Tortoise: the year that New York women—speedy, combative, bargain-driven shoppers—finally slowed their credit card use to a crawl; and tortoiseshell, named for a lumbering, dwindling beast, bled downward from our sunglasses to color the rest of our wardrobes.

Late last week, the city’s beleaguered retail Read More

By Meredith Bryan 11/19/08 12:45am

Now Entering Candyland! Style.com Editor Pratts Price Urges Us to Keep Shopping

On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 12, Style.com’s executive fashion director, Candy Pratts Price, was standing in the bar of Bergdorf Goodman’s seventh-floor restaurant wearing a black Calvin Klein minidress and black bejeweled Edmundo Castillo ankle boots, surrounded by 200 of her nearest and dearest, there to celebrate her new book, American Fashion Accessories.

Read More

By Nicholas Boston 2/26/07 12:00am

The Heir to Bill Cunningham?

When Scott Schuman, the amateur photographer who runs the fashion blog The Sartorialist, first attempted to take a photograph of Carine Roitfeld, editor in chief of French Vogue and mom to New York “It” fille Julia Restoin-Roitfeld, at the spring 2007 Burberry show in Milan, she had no idea who he was. “I was trying Read More

By Noelle Hancock 9/15/03 12:00am

Eight Day Week

Wednesday 10th

How do we know summer is over? Simple : The scar tissue on our feet from all those lesion-inducing strappy sandals. Today, cobbler Manolo Blahnik -whose shoes would cost us a month’s rent on our shoebox of anapartment-puts his brood on display at Phillips, de Pury and Luxembourg. “They’re gag-worthy! I was Read More

By Christine Muhlke 4/30/01 12:00am

Do-It-Yourself Dinner

It figures that after nearly a decade of affluence, excess and hot-toweled pampering, a New York restaurant could come along and make a big splash simply by offering people the opportunity to fend for themselves.

That’s much of the appeal of Craft, an oddly conceived new restaurant in the Flatiron district launched by Gramercy Tavern Read More