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Fug Girls: Badgley Mischka Draws a Fake Cheerleader, a Real Housewife, and Denise Richards

Some of our favorite celebrity sightings are the ones that aren’t (like the time we thought we saw Regis at Miss Sixty). At Badgley Mischka on Tuesday morning, a tall tan blonde in gold and an updo descended the stairs and pushed for the front row, and we thought, “Holy cats, it’s Carrie Underwood!” So we scurried right up behind her … and then almost collided with her back, because she had stopped to take photos of Gabrielle Union. We love the idea that Carrie Underwood would be starstruck by a Bring It On star — it is the world’s seminal cheerleading movie — but in that moment we knew, correctly, that it could not be she. Hey, at least this one was close, unlike that time we thought a dude was Gwyneth Paltrow.

Gabrielle wore a cream dress with a fringe overlay that extended past the hem, which required a fair bit of wrangling every time she sat down after a photo op. “Is that, like, a Cheetah Girl?” we overheard a dude wonder. Looks like we aren’t alone in the mistaken-identity game, although in our opinion, any grown person who can reference the Cheetah Girls with a straight face should be intimately familiar with Bring It On.

See more: Badgley Mischka’s Spring 2011 Collection

Across the way, there was Beth Ostrosky Stern, Nicole Murphy, singer Brandy, and actress Meaghan Jette Martin from the canceled 10 Things I Hate About You sitcom (based on a movie starring one Gabrielle Union). Even though she sported the sparkly leather half-leggings of a young celebrity, Martin ended up in a conversation with two older ladies who eventually accidentally revealed they thought Martin’s PR girl was the famous one. Martin took it in stride, but … awkward.

Union, meanwhile, sat with Elle’s Joe Zee on one side and Kristin Cavallari on the other. But nobody paid them terribly much mind until Denise Richards arrived, at which point the runway photogs acted as if it were Keith Richards, springing into action for a crowded, boisterous ten minutes of begging them all to look this way or that for the dream group shot. The sudden reemergence of Denise Richards perplexes us. Where did this come from? Although she is possibly the first celebrity of this era whose reality show did her no fame favors, so she is therefore a scientific oddity and demands close study.

Kelly Killoren Bensimon, in that sense pretty much Denise’s opposite, fielded several questions about her Real Housewives archrival Bethenny Frankel leaving the series to focus on her own show. She was deeply and seemingly genuinely kind, noting that Bethenny’s success is “great for the [Real Housewives] brand,” and wished her nothing but happiness before enthusiastically segueing into a discussion about her own “inexpensive and hot” jewelry line. Somebody took her gracious pills this morning. And also her pants pills: For probably only the second time in recent history, Killoren Bensimon was not wearing a tunic as a dress. Without the help of her thighs, we almost didn’t recognize her. And we suspect she’d rather be mistaken for a dude than not recognized at all.

Fug Girls: Badgley Mischka Draws a Fake Cheerleader, a Real Housewife, and Denise Richards