Singular Sensation
In a life already packed with surprising twists and tabloids-ready turns; Mary-Kate Olsen has done what many never imagined possible: fashioned herself a serious designer and forged an identity all her own.
Hanging out with Mary-Kate Olsen is a little bit like wandering through a Venetian palazzo: Everything is exquisite and fragile and slightly haunted, and you keep thinking the whole thing is going to sink to the bottom of the sea any minute, but somehow it never does.
"We're like two little young old women who have been through a lot," says Mary-Kate, referring to herself and her twin sister, Ashley, with whom she built the billion-dollars tween entertainment-and-lifestyle empire Dualstar, and with whom she now designs the luxurious clothing line The Row. "We're turning 24 on Sunday, and I said to Ash, 'Can you believe we're turning 48?'" Perched on a black sofa in Dualstar's sunny loft of offices in Chelsea in New York City, Mary-Kate smiles sadly and shrugs. "We've been working since we were 9 months old. That's the way we feel."
Like all great eccentrics, Mary-Kate has cultivated her particular brand of wry, world-weary beauty into a kind of performance art that can only be described as part Little Edie Beale, part Marchesa di Casati, and part Jeff Spicoli. Standing just over 5 feet tall in her stockinged feet, with unbrushed surfer-blonde hair, a little heart-shaped face, and oversize crystal-blue eyes, Mary-Kate is beautiful in the exaggerated, waifish manner of a Margaret Keane painting. A self-proclaimed "Gemini" and a passionate fan of the old hippie hangout of Woodstock, New York, she is fond of huge chunky rings and voluminous embroidered capes and long fringed shawls, and when she sits, she tends to curl around herself and drag deeply off her Merit Ultra Light cigarette, filling the air with smoke, as if she wants to disappear.
In a sense, Mary-Kate does want to disappear. "It's nice because a lot of people don't know we're behind some of the brands," she says of Dualstar, which she and Ashley have gradually transformed from a gazillion-dollar octopus of a company built entirely around Mary-Kate and Ashley's names and their grinning preteen faces, into a discreet little hive in which she and Ashley design (in addition to The Row) the popular contemporary line Elizabeth and James and a new, lower-priced line for JCPenny, Olsenboye. "It's kind of like a mask to hide behind, because your whole life, you've been out there... in public..." Mary-Kate continues. Like a lot of her sentences, this one trails off before it reaches the finish line. "Ums" and "you knows" run wild through her speech like mint in a garden.
For this reason, you might be tempted to think that she was a bit spacey, but you'd be wrong. Mary-Kate Olsen isn't spacey at all. Behind the clouds of smoke and draggy speech, Mary-Kate Olsen is rather beautiful and ingeniously defended, like the bullion in Fort Knox. She is also quietly busy running (with her sister) one of the more dynamic fashion houses in New York City.
♦ "Ash?" Mary-Kate says, standing in front of a rack of potential fabrics for the spring 2011 collection in The Row's Chelsea design room. Built around the concept of "high-end basics" and beloved by celebs like Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Carey Mulligan, The Row offers the kind of cool, simple, perfectly tailored little nothings that inevitably cost enough to choke a horse. (A T-shirt will set you back $250.) "Is this the one you liked?" Mary-Kate continues, pulling out a piece of intentionally crumpled white cotton and glancing at her sister with an arched eyebrow. "Cause ... this one has sparkles in it."
"Oh, yeah," says Ashley, who is the spitting image of her sister, but whose style is markedly less dramatic and ghostly than Mary-Kate's. (While Mary-Kate teeters around in black Lanvin boots with high chrome heels, leather leggings, and a fringed red silk shawl, Ashley sports brushed hair, and oversize sky-blue linen shirt, and flat sandals.) "I wanted to see if we could get it without the sparkles," she says.
"Hmm..." says Mary-Kate, turning the fabric towards the sunlight so that it throws off tiny rainbows.
"I know," says Ashley, laughing. "It's a problem."
"Sometimes Ash and I have to bring each other back, or push each other more," Mary-Kate said to me earlier. "It's really helpful to have another half; we're constantly checking in with each other."
Because The Row's spring collection is still in the planning phases (and because they're about to shoot the look book for the resort collection), the design room is kind of a mess today. Not a bad mess - more like the organized-chaos mess that inevitably happens when people roll up their sleeves and get creative. Big pale drifts of satin and chiffon and linen and leather and cotton lie all over the tables and the floor. A barefoot model stand in front of the three-way mirror, while about five people, including Mary-Kate and Ashley, pinch and pull at the black cotton camisole she's wearing. Inspiration boards are everywhere, covered with a crazy mix of photos: Here's an image of a woman lounging in a long, periwinkle silk Fortuny evening gown; here's an old African tribal man whose entire head (and pipe) is covered in pinkish-brown dust.
"That color," Mary-Kate says, cocking her head and pointing at the dust-covered man. "I love that dusty-pink color. Isn't it beautiful?"
Soon, she is down on the floor, on her hands and knees, digging around in another big pile of fabrics and calling me over. "Here, come look at this one," she says to me, holding up a piece of gray weathered-looking silk. "This is super-stunning..." She crumples it up in her hand like a paper napkin, then looks at it. "But see, the hand isn't there," she says, referring to the feel of the fabric. "We're doing a lot of pleating right now, so we have to get fabric that has the right drape to it."
Fabric is a communal obsession at The Row. The majority of the fabrics come from Italy, and they tend to be obscenely luxurious. "For us, everything starts with the fabric," Mary-Kate says. "Only after we've picked the fabrics do we start thinking about the silhouettes and the inspiration." For example, when they discovered heart-meltingly soft stretch leather a few season ago, they saw it immediately: leather leggings, long and super-skinny ones, tight as panty hose but insanely comfortable. "They're our number one seller," says Mary-Kate. "Next season we're doing them high-waisted, low-waisted, cropped, long, flared, you name it."
In some ways, The Row's success has become as a surprise to the sisters, given the fact that, as Mary-Kate says, "It took us a year-and-a-half to make the first T-shirt." But their success in the fashion industry - and more specifically the hard work that got them there - seems to have been a salvation of sorts, especially for Mary-Kate.
Ever since she turned up for her freshman year at NYU with her destroyed Balenciaga lariat bags and her bag-lady-chic aesthetic, Mary-Kate has fascinated people. Part of this fascination comes from the general knowledge that she made somewhere around $75 million before she was 16 years old. (Most of the money was made from the lifestyle brand mary-kateandashley, which, through licensing agreements, churned out everything from lip gloss to CD players; for years, every Wal-Mart store had 1,400 square feet devoted to Mary-Kate and Ashley's products.) Another part of the fascination comes from the fact that most of America watched her and Ashley grow up on their TV sets - first in their shared role as the wise-cracking, putty-faced baby Michelle Tanner on Full House, then as the wholesome, grinning child star of a whole sanitized mountain range of hugely popular direct-to-video movies.
By the time their 18th birthday rolled around, Mary-Kate-and-Ashley-watching had become a kind of national past time. Suddenly, they weren't cute little girl twins anymore. They were hot, rich, almost-legal twins. No less than seven seperate websites counted down the minutes to their birthday, with one particularly tacky standout crowing, "Gentlemen, start your engines and get out your best booze" when the "OlsenMeter" clock struck midnight.
But while the free world (or at least the idiot male portion of it) was busy popping champagne, the sisters were quietly plotting to take back control of their lives. As soon as they turned 18, Mary-Kate and Ashley ousted Dualstar CEO Richard Thorne and installed themselves as the company's copresidents. It was an audacious, risky move - one of those things that could turn out to be either really, really great or really, really disastrous.
For a while there, things seemed headed in a less-than-promising direction. A few years into the millennium, Mary-Kate's already small frame appeared alarmingly thin, her eye makeup got darker, and the men in her life went from fresh-scrubbed Hollywood prince David Katzenberg (son of DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg) to scruffy artist types like Heath Ledger and the painter Max Snow, with whom she was seen partying at places like New York's notorious Beatrice Inn. In 2004, she entered treatment for an eating disorder. And by 2009, Ledger was dead of an accidental overdose.
Understandably, Mar-Kate does not like to talk about this part of her past. What she will say, however, is that she has learned to seek help when necessary. "I have people who I talk to," she says, when I ask if she's in therapy. "I think it's really imporatnt to be able to talk when something's wrong. I learned at a really young age that if you don't talk about it, it can drive you insane."
♦ Aside from talking, Mary-Kate seems to have also found solace in her work. A few days after my trip to her showroom, she meets me for coffee at Cafe Cluny in the West Village. Sales of The Row's fall line start next week, and she's armed with a thick black binder full of details for her upcoming sales meetings, photo shoots, and design meetings. "The schedule is insane right now," she says, thumbing through the pages of meetings set up at places like Barneys and Intermix and Neiman Marcus. But she sounds kind of proud when she says it. Mary-Kate literally lights up when she's talking about fashion. She's dressed more seriously now, in a chic, gray structured wool blazer belted tightly at the waist and a fitted black pencil skirt, both from The Row. The blonde surfer hair is still unbrushed, the chunky rings still dwarf her tiny fingers, but it works somehow, this bohemian businesswoman look. When I ask her if she thinks she'll continue acting, Mary-Kate says, "You know, I still read scripts, and if something great comes along, that's great ... but this is my day job. The Row is where I go every day."
At the moment, The Row's future seems decidedly rosy. Giambattista Valli, Diane von Furstenberg, and Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandeze of Proenza Schouler ("Jack and Laz," as Mary-Kate calls them) are all devoted supporters of Mary-Kate and Ashley, and Angelina Jolie wears the line throughout her recently released thriller, Salt. In addition to braching out into menswear in 2009, The Row is now sold in 25 countries, and the response to the women's fall 2010 collection was so huge, the sisters ended up selling pieces to buyers directly off the runway. "It was crazy," says Mary-Kate, of the dinner party on the roof of the Gramercy Park Hotel after the presentation, which included impossibly cool hipsters like Spike Jonze and Chloë Sevigny.
Looking at her now, I find myself thinking about a moment back in the studio, when I asked Mary-kate if any of her friends ever tease her about the old days - the days of 6-year-old Mary-Kate and Ashley dancing around in tiny, matching gray trenchcoats and fedoras. She was silent for a moment, the said, "I think it's more that they feel sorry for us ... because it's kind of bittersweet. I mean, we were like little monkey performers, you know? I look at old photos of me and I don't feel connected to them at all; it doesn't feel like me. It feels like a role that I played." She paused and, once again, smiled sadly. "I would never wish my upbringing upon anyone ... but I wouldn't take it back for the world."
Marie-Claire
September 2010
Story By: Kimberly Cutter
Photographed by: Tesh
Fashion editor: Alison Edmond
