The Battle of the Headband Girls Intensifies

It's no longer enough just to wear a headband--now everyone wants to lay claim to having started the ubiquitous trend. According to PopCrunch.com, actress Mischa Barton, who has been working on a line of headbands (apparently in lieu of a successful acting career), is peeved that her friend Nicole Richie has announced that she will too design a line of decorative headbands under her line, House of Harlow 1960.

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.