There are so many reasons I would never consider a homebirth — despite two super-easy pregnancies and, so far, one ridiculously quick L&D in which my doc instructed me to stop laughing before the baby fell out — but the thing I really, really don’t understand — besides the safety issues and the lack-of-meds issues — is the clean-up issue. Which, I understand, probably seems too trivial to include in an article like New York Magazine’s fantastic profile of the midwife-leader of the home-birth movement. But here’s the thing: Birth is a liquid mess of a business, and despite the fact that home-births take place in a tub, there’s also the fact that you leak all kinds of who-knows-what for days afterward. Who wants to muck up hyper-thread-count sheets, much less perform any kind of post-birth, infant-howling-in-the-background floor-scrubbing when there is a place that is not your home that is full of people whose sole job it is to take care of that stuff? I, for one, am way too jappy to even think about doing anything otherwise.

How adorable are Thakoon and Jason Wu, pictured here in The New Yorker’s Style Issue? But as much as I love the suddenly high profile of two young designers — courtesy of Michelle Obama — I can’t help but wonder why the glossies aren’t giving Isabel Toledo, who crafted MObama’s yellow inauguration day outfit, similarly copious press. Like Thakoon and Wu, Toledo is the children of immigrants, though as a Cuban-American she is less obviously “the other.” So is it a visual thing — that she would make a more visually awkward pairing than a couple of twentysomethings of Asian decent? Or her nearly 50 years? Or that her company never really achieved commercial viability — and is therefore one without much future magazine-advertising potential? Whatever the reason, I hope Mrs. Obama will take the press’s neglect as a cue to wear much, much more Isabel Toledo — whose talents are far, far superior to Jason Wu’s anyway.

What do you do when you are one of the most powerful people in fashion, and you are guaranteed NOT to receive an invite to the biggest fashion party of the year? (Rivalries will do that.) If you are Glenda Bailey of Harper’s Bazaar, you take your rival’s party theme and shamelessly run with it in your own pages. Ergo “Gisele: Supermodel Muse,” a supremely literal take on the “Model as Muse” party/exhibition at the Met’s Costume Institute, which is sponsored by — you guessed it — Vogue. Not incidentally, the Met/Vogue event is being co-chaired by Kate Moss. And Gisele, the one model who truly competes with Moss on the world stage, is not slated for Vogue’s annual multi-major-model May cover, which is pegged to the gala. For Bailey, putting Gisele on her April cover — so sneaky, one month early! — means treading that ballsy-slash-pathetic line that must be so familiar to her at this point. But if you take out the insidery politics, as Bailey knows most readers remain unaware, then I think she’s largely succeeded. The Gisele story is a fantastic testament to the model’s versatility, with images inspired by styles of the 1950s onward. And carrying the model theme through the rest of the book, the feature well hopefully — fingers crossed! — closes the door on the celeb-dominated spreads of the past decade, with five models-only fashion stories. Here’s hoping Vogue can similary resist its dark socialite and celebrity urges next month.