The Olsen twins are fashion sphinxes: though their celebrity and clutch of fashion lines make them huge style influences, they rarely agree to interviews and don’t tend to interact with fans.
Well, Style.com made it into the Olsens’ lower Manhattan offices for one of those elusive sit-downs with the designers. In it, Mary-Kate and Ashley hold forth on the genesis of their oft-imitated dress sense, their designer inspirations, and why you won’t catch them on Facebook or Twitter.
One of the first things we learn is that the Olsens’ particular brand of ‘granny chic’ stemmed from a desire to avoid the paparazzi and stay warm in the process.
‘That moment for us was us waking up, going to school, and not wanting anyone to take our picture. Kind of a piece of protection,’ Ashley said.
Mary-Kate continued, ‘For me, it was so cold, like the wind chill. How could you not put on 20 things when you’re going from Los Angeles to walking through the snow?’
Their list of avant-garde and esoteric designer influences was interesting—Yohji Yamamoto , Fortuny (famous for pleats) and Christian Lacroix —but so is the fact that Mary-Kate and Ashley oversee every aspect of The Row , from fabric selection to balance sheets. The sisters, nominated for the Swarovski Award for Womenswear at June’s CFDA Awards, said that having a twin’s support at every stage of running their business has been crucial to their success.
‘At the end of the day, we know that every decision we make, we can hold ourselves accountable for it ourselves,’ Ashley said. ‘There’s no pointing fingers at anyone.’
As for their aversion to social media? ‘We’ve spent our whole lives trying to not let people have that accessibility, so it would go against everything we’ve done in our lives to not be in the public,’ Ashley said.
See The Row's latest collection here...
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