“I remember standing at the rack with her, with her holding these T-shirts,” Kanai says. Marie Claire editor-in-chief Aya Kanai witnessed the genesis of the Row at a Nylon cover shoot with 20-year-old Ashley back in 2006. (Like Pokémon, they thrived from the 90s all the way through to today, and grew more powerful with each evolution.) The Olsens turned their backs on acting-though Mary-Kate would take occasional jobs through 2011-and pivoted from an empire built on their personal brand to a business in which they attempted to almost erase themselves, letting the product speak for itself. Turns out they were laying the groundwork for their next act.
“Everything was oversized and they had the bug-eyed glasses and that bag lady look, and they were always carrying a Starbucks. “I think they called it dumpster chic,” says Teri Agins, longtime fashion critic and author of Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers. Then, a generation watched as the twins reemerged during their glamorous NYU years, swaddled in floor-grazing hemlines and scarves and improbable layers, and promptly convinced America’s teens to start dressing on the scrubby side of bohemian.Īshley Olsen, spotted in Culver City, California, in 2007. “She would talk about filming different movies, and I realized later that all of her stories were pulled from the bloopers,” Gould recalls, in wonderment that she (and the internet) were ever so young. So large did Mary-Kate and Ashley loom in the collective imagination of their generation, that Gould and her brother were catfished by someone pretending to be Mary-Kate, a girl presumably exploring the limits of the early web’s anonymity, and maybe even living out her own Olsen fantasy. “It was like the biggest issue in my brain that I didn’t know if I wanted to be more Mary-Kate or more Ashley.” She’d drag her mom out to buy clothes inspired by their outfits-mostly Mary-Kate’s, but also Ashley’s. “I would play imaginary games by myself, pretending to be one of them,” she laughs. Hallie Gould, Byrdie senior editor and lifetime Olsen devotee, offers a prime example of the worship the preteen twins inspired. The Adventures of Mary-Kate and Ashley, indeed. For most celebrities, tabloid drama of this caliber would at least threaten to alter their elevated status, but Mary-Kate and Ashley’s pedestal doesn’t even have a crack. But even more extraordinary? That the bombshell story doesn’t have a chance of diminishing fans’ love for the twins. That all of this would happen during quarantine, when fans would expect to hear even less from the Olsen camp, is wondrous. It’s the textual equivalent of one of their transcendent paparazzi shots (like, yes, the one with the petite Mary-Kate enjoying a stroll alongside the towering Sarkozy and his child, who is also taller than Mary-Kate). Buried in these court documents are delicious tidbits (they own a second New York apartment on East 49th Street of all places?!), all devoid of context. But for the most devoted, it’s a gift that there’s Olsen news at all-and, true to form, this revelation was at least a little bizarre. This is not, of course, the kind of news fans want from Mary-Kate it’s objectively sad. They pivoted from an empire built on their personal brand to a business in which they erased themselves, letting the product speak for itself.
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