In the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, right on time, Mary-Kate Olsen is a kind of uncanny, elfin apparition. She’s wearing gobs of eyeliner, platform alligator stiletto heels, and a black wool coat buttoned up to her neck. She looks like a cross between J.T. Leroy, Wednesday Addams, and one of those big-eyed waifs from Margaret Keane paintings. She is fragile and goth, her tiny fingers covered in rings. She’s both glamorous and bohemian, eccentric and studied, and once she enters the room, it’s sort of impossible to look away. Her look—both an unmistakable signature and a kind of disguise—has been so widely emulated that it’s stunning to see the original in action.
Mary-Kate Olsen and her twin sister, Ashley, have been famous their entire lives. They are the rarest of child stars in that they have not grown up ugly, angry, or (it seems) insane. They’ve maintained their preadolescent adorability, with round eyes and faces and little button noses, and they’ve also maintained their mind-boggling fortune. When they were infants, they were cast in the single role of Michelle Tanner, the wisecracking baby of the Full House family. Little girls went mad for Michelle, madder still when it was discovered there were two of them, and their parents eventually figured out that this was a gold mine. With their then-manager, Robert Thorne, they co-founded Dualstar Entertainment, a business with the singular goal of leveraging the popularity of these two live Kewpie dolls. Before long, the Olsens were doing megabusiness in straight-to-video movies, and TV shows with names like Mary-Kate and Ashley in Action! Puppy Love, and licensing their names to cheap and cheerful lines of furniture and clothing for tweens—that is, girls age 5 to 12. Dualstar is now America’s number-one-selling brand in a number of categories: It’s the top fashion and lifestyle brand for girls and the number-one girls’ video franchise of all time. Books about the Olsens’ adventures have sold 40 million copies. In 2005, on the girls’ 18th birthday, they assumed decision-making, leadership roles at Dualstar; at that point, the company was doing $1.2 billion in sales a year. It sold the Olsens as wholesome and bright, accessible and mainstream. But their lives have become so much more sophisticated and complicated than their products. They have been selling Formica bedroom sets in pastel colors, but they worship Ghesquière.
This season, their contradictions resolve. They have just launched the Row, a line far more about who they’re becoming as adults than who they’ve been, in the eyes of the world, for such a long time.
It’s not the usual thing for celebrities of any age to actually have style, personal style, that is unique and individual and achieved on their own. But the Olsens, love it or hate it, do have style; they have it in buckets. While they have stopped with the corny matching outfits, their looks have developed as jarring mirror images of one another; they still exist in a little world of two. But there are subtle differences: Mary-Kate might wear ten kooky rings, Ashley just two or three. But, as Mary-Kate puts it: “If I sleep over at my sister’s, I can definitely get dressed from her closet in the morning.” Their signature look mixes Edie Beale with Balenciaga, Johnny Depp, and John Galliano. They don’t wear clothes that are conspicuously slutty or sexy or easy to predict. Even though supermarket tabloids condemn them to worst-dressed lists, fashion people are obsessed with their arms-open embrace of the industry’s avant-garde. They experiment with proportion and silhouette. They mix vintage and new, labels and non. They’ve raised accessorizing to a form of high, glamorous art. If the Olsens’ style resembles anyone at all, it’s not Lindsay Lohan or Mandy Moore or any of their other presumptive peers—they dress like sittings editors at French Vogue.
Mary-Kate and Ashley prefer to do their interviews separately these days. It’s part of a protracted maturation that really began during the two years they spent in New York as students at NYU. “We got this huge apartment and designed it,” Ashley says, “and then we never moved into it because we decided to live apart, and it was the best decision we ever made.” They explored separate interests: architecture for Ashley, photography for Mary-Kate. But where they met then, and still meet now, is at fashion, and that’s what they’re here to discuss.
The Row consists mainly of expensive knit T-shirts with fancy French seams, and a few minimalist separates, like a well-cut blazer and a tight, banded miniskirt in the style of Hervé Léger. Conspicuous flash is in the fur coats, which are oversize, luscious, but still somewhat plain. Unlike with their licensed collections, Mary-Kate and Ashley are hugely involved with the Row’s design process from start to finish, working in close tandem with a designer. The palette is as minimal as the collection: black, white, cream, gray, the occasional shot of red, and the label itself, a small, easy-to-miss gold chain embossed THE ROW. It’s like the Olsens themselves in its simultaneous desire to be both noticed and hidden.
‘I grew up horseback riding,” Mary-Kate says, lighting the first of what will be many Marlboro reds. “I never even picked up a fashion magazine when I was a kid.” But she did like fashion, and marvels with gaspy teenage incredulity over the dress code at her high school (khaki pants, collared shirts, closed-toed shoes), which, so she figures, was what first inspired her to look less like everyone else.
Mary-Kate’s first show was Marc Jacobs. Then there was a trip to Paris: Balenciaga, Christian Dior, French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. “When I really started looking at fashion, I was amazed,” she says. She claims to have arrived at her vampiric European look through a series of accidents. There was the giant-sweater boho era of her (short-lived) NYU career—“I was just trying to stay warm!” She also insists she was trying to be somewhat inconspicuous on her way to class, but the heaped-on layers, the giant sunglasses, the hunormous lattes had quite the opposite effect. Every other starlet was showing oodles of flesh, and here was this little gremlin buried in a massive hat. How not to be intrigued?
Mary-Kate left NYU (she’s still enrolled and has just a year and a half to go) because she didn’t feel safe, she says. She was freaked out by the kids in her class who were selling anecdotes to tabloids, in some cases even getting school credit for it. “They’d have internships at the weeklies,” she says, adding, “Learning is not fun if you’re not safe.”
Mary-Kate’s style has evolved since then. Fashion followed her into big coats and glasses, so now she is going small, dressed today in a tiny knit black dress and well-fitted coat.
The Row, she says, “was my sister’s baby, and of course I wanted to do whatever I could to help her.” She suggested additions to the line, like oversize man-tailored pants.
Both Olsens insist that they don’t shop much. They like simple, somewhat anonymous pieces and loads of accessories. “I love how you can totally change your look by changing your shoes,” Mary-Kate says, and pauses. “Or maybe you don’t look different, and no one else thinks you look different, but I feel different, anyway.” She laughs the crinkly-nosed, squinty-eyed chipmunk laugh that made her a tween queen, and then announces that she’s off to an audition. “I’m so sorry,” she says a few times, and then she’s gone.
Ashley arrives next, tottering across the garden on her own crazy, crazy shoes: They are sandals, platforms, stilettos all at once. Ashley is still tiny but somehow more robust than her sister. She was born first, is maybe two inches taller, and her bearing is far more alpha than Mary-Kate’s. Her look is somehow sleeker—giant Christian Dior shades, tight, narrow rubber pants, a tiny leather jacket with little ruched sleeves. Where Mary-Kate takes her soy latte decaf, Ashley asks for a double shot.
Within seconds of sitting (and lighting her Parliament Light), she’s talking business. “This is hands-on,” she says. “It’s production, it’s planning, it’s taking the right steps. It’s everything you need to do to start a business.” She looks like something from a cartoon, but she talks like she’s just stepped out of a Joan Collins boardroom scene.
The Olsens have been businesswomen for years, vetting their merchandising deals at Wal-Mart and elsewhere. But their work —in both fashion and “film”—has never been exactly a reflection of who they were or the adult lives they’d been leading. “When we were growing up, it was always about being appropriate,” Ashley says of the years spent in matching floral party dresses and silly sailor hats. And that’s what their Wal-Mart line reflects. But they’ve grown up to be something other than mainstream and appropriate. College taught Ashley what she wanted to do, but, as is so often the case, inadvertently. “I was studying architecture and psychology and I loved it, but I kept thinking about T-shirts and how to make the perfect one. It was my dad who said, ‘You should do it.’ ”
So she called a childhood friend, a designer named Danielle Sherman, and got to work. “That’s what I’m good at,” she says. “Seeing voids.” Ashley says she left NYU because she was ready to do the Row. “Wal-Mart was about the customer,” she says. “It taught us how to be commercial. This is about me and my sister, and what we like to wear.”
The Olsens are aware that their fame, so useful at Dualstar, is liable to be a hindrance with their new line—fashionistas won’t fall over each other to buy $150 T-shirts from a young-adult brand. So the Olsen name appears nowhere on the product, and they won’t be photographed in its promotion.
Whether the Row will attract the customers who buy Alaïa and Ghesquière is an open question. But the clothes do, in fact, stand on their own. They are sophisticated, elegant, versatile, understated. In a way, it’s a different tween act—idols to both goofy little girls and snotty fashion ladies. And for all their riches, it’s what they wanted. “I think,” says Mary-Kate, “my sister would be happy selling it out of the back of her car.”
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Mary-Kate Olsen is reading the fine print. We are at a trapeze school in midtown Manhattan, and she has in her diminutive lap the release form that the school has given her in order to indemnify itself against any personal injuries that its students might incur during class. I had scribbled my initials in all the myriad boxes required without reading one syllable on the page. But not the meticulous Mary-Kate. She refuses to be hurried, though she is horribly jet-lagged from a quick business trip to Asia to publicize her two clothing lines, the Row—which consists of high-end sophisticated separates in a minimal palette, such as cashmere French-seam T-shirts, well-cut blazers, leather pants, and banded miniskirts à la Hervé Léger—and Elizabeth and James, which includes contemporary androgynous designs inspired by some of the vintage pieces that Mary-Kate and her sister Ashley own. Indeed, she and Ashley closely oversee the operations of both brands, with Mary-Kate focusing on Elizabeth and James and Ashley focusing on the Row. Both sisters conceive and sketch out designs for both lines (collaborating with designer Jane Siskin on Elizabeth and James). The lines are the Olsens’ latest wildly successful business endeavors, in addition to Dualstar Entertainment Group, their billion-dollar conglomerate
Mary-Kate’s many bracelets jangle as she runs her multiringed hand across the words of the trapeze-school document. Poor thing, I think, even having fun is a contractual transaction. “Don’t worry. I kind of like reading the fine print,” she says, as if reading my mind as well while she squints at the legalese through the gigantic, round sunglasses that obscure her beauty and make her appear like a douroucouli with a rather devilish sense of fashion. “I’ve spent my whole life reading it,” she says, initialing the last box.
Mary Kate Olsen Elle July 2008
Believe me, trapeze school was Mary-Kate’s idea. I had e-mailed her a few days before and suggested we see the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha at the Met or peruse the Christian Louboutin show at the FIT museum. “I don’t know,” she tells me now, handing the release form back to the receptionist. “I was sitting in China, and I thought: trapeze class!” That one sentence—absurdly fabulous and fearless at once—pretty much sums up this 22-year-old child-woman in my presence. Again she reads my mind. “I know. Kooky, huh?” she confesses. “Almost crazy. Almost.” She kicks off her YSL heels and removes her sunglasses to stare up at the trapeze high above us with her lovely tired eyes. She contemplates the almost-craziness of it all. “I wonder what would happen if I just quit everything and joined the circus,” she says softly. “Honey, your life is enough of a circus already,” I tell her.“No shit,” she says.
“Mary-Kate is fragile yet strong,” says Diane von Furstenberg, whom Olsen interviewed for the upcoming coffee-table book Influence, an anthology of interviews, photographs, and artwork that she and Ashley are compiling as part of their publishing agreement with Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin’s Young Readers Group. Von Furstenberg, perhaps seeing a lot of herself in Mary-Kate—a fierce ambition tempered by empathy; a talent for business tethered to an artistic spirit—has become a kind of mentor for her. “She’s an old soul in a very young girl,” the designer says. “Hers is a story that has just begun.”
And yet its narrative has been a part of pop culture for all of her 22 years, ever since she and her sister alternated playing the role of Michelle Tanner on TV’s Full House from the age of nine months until they were nine. They parlayed that role through their childhoods and tween and teenage years into an array of business endeavors that formed the basis of Dualstar. When they were four years old, their father hired lawyer Robert Thorne to run the company; the twins ousted Thorne when they turned 18 and became copresidents themselves. It was Thorne who persuaded ABC to raise the toddlers’ Full House salary from $4,000 to $25,000 an episode; by the series’ end, they were reportedly up to $150,000 an episode. Their first ABC special was such a hit for the network that, at six, the twins earned executive producer credits, making them two of the youngest EPs ever. Thorne’s business negotiations on their behalf made merchandising history: 45 direct-to-video films that reportedly grossed more than $750 million, three musical videos that went multiplatinum, 14 albums, a website, a video game venture, a line of dolls from Mattel, a library of Olsen twin books, and a fashion line sold through Wal-Mart that included accessories and cosmetics that, according to news reports, made more than $500 million back in 2003. Now that they’re grown-ups, the Olsens are using their intrinsic fashion sense and business expertise to expand the success of the Row (launched in 2006) and Elizabeth and James (2007), which are sold at stores worldwide.
That’s the first ring of Mary-Kate’s three-ring-circus life: her role as fashion designer and savvy businesswoman. But at times it has seemed as if she has morphed into the product itself. “Oh, yeah,” she agrees. “The year before Ashley and I went to college, we thought, We’ve had it. We so needed a break. I just wanted a change.” Her parents—Dave, formerly a mortgage banker, and Jarnette, an ex–ballet dancer, who divorced when Mary-Kate and Ashley were nine—were understanding and knew it was time for their daughters to leave Sherman Oaks, California, and set out on a life of their own. Though anyone who allows infants to be cast on a sitcom could be accused of being a “stage parent,” Dave and Jarnette always insisted that Mary-Kate and Ashley experience a regular childhood; rather than having the girls tutored on sets, they enrolled them in Campbell Hall Episcopal School in North Hollywood. Plus, there were other children at home who ensured the girls wouldn’t be too spoiled; siblings have a way of not seeing other siblings as pampered stars. The twins have one older brother and a younger sister (for whom the line Elizabeth and James was named). Dave has two other children from his second marriage. “I grew up going to regular school and still have friends from that time in my life,” Mary-Kate says of her years at Campbell Hall. “And as crazy and hardworking as my life has been, my parents knew how important it was to have a normal life as well. I grew up in a big family. And although I was always surrounded by a lot of adults [in show business], my big hobby was horseback riding, so I was surrounded by all my horseback riding friends, too. I was surrounded by people who cared about me and loved me.”
Did she ever feel lonely when she and Ashley moved east to attend NYU? It was such a drastic break from her Southern California existence. “Everybody has their down times when they feel alone,” she tells me. “But I think alone time is good. When we were interviewing Diane [von Furstenberg] for our book, she said it’s important to take time for yourself in order to replenish yourself.”
The NYU experience wasn’t all great. When some of their fellow students began selling information about them to the tabloids, she and her sister no longer felt safe there. They returned to what they knew best: business.
Do profit motives complicate or even cause sibling rivalry? “We don’t agree all the time. The way we go about business or designing or making a decision is that we come at it from two completely different angles that at the end of the day, even when we don’t think we’re agreeing with each other, we are agreeing. We’re just getting there in different ways. Unless you’re a twin, you honestly can’t know how close twins can be. There’s such a strength, but that also makes it…” Her voice trails off. “When there’s that much love there’s…” Again she stops. She gives me a wan smile. I attempt to help her explain: When twins grow up and go their separate ways, is it like an amicable divorce? “Well, there’s the opposite of everything, but it stems from love, and it stems from passion. We’re driven people. I do know I can’t work in an office. Ashley, on the other hand, loves going to an office.”
Mary-Kate is considered the artsier of the two sisters. Her own fashion sense borders on the eccentric, but when everyone strives to look like everyone else, such individuality is what the fashion world sorely needs. In staking out her style she has become the latest in a long line of fashion It Girls that includes Suzy Parker, Ali MacGraw, Penelope Tree, Edie Sedgwick, and Isabella Blow. For some, the It-ness proved tragic. For others, it was their blue-bloodedness that caused the excitable covey known as the fashion flock to flutter about them. But Mary-Kate is an anomaly in this lineage. She is not only a tastemaker but also a taste macher. And yet she dresses with an abandon that borders on indifference. In fact, her style has been referred to as “bag-lady chic.” “Boho chic, you mean?” she asks. Whatever the word, her look is certainly singular and disproves the dictum that designer clothes must be worn by the deliriously tall, since Mary-Kate is barely five feet without the help of her YSL heels.
“I love a tiny woman in Chanel,” Karl Lagerfeld says. “Coco herself was tiny, so you don’t need to be a giant to look good in these. I like the way M.K. is mixing Chanel with other things. Life is not a fashion show, and I find a total designer look boring.”
Lauren Hutton, who modeled for the Row’s spring ’08 lookbook, says, “I feel like M.K. is a kindred spirit. She lives an experimental life. When you’re young, you should be trying on lots of things, not just clothes. She understands that. You’re not born with taste. That’s a bunch of hooey. Like everything else, taste is a process of discovery. I like that about her. She’s always discovering her tastes.”
Mary-Kate has an innate sense of style that follows no rules,” designer Giambattista Valli says. “Her personal style surpasses fashion. I’d like to design a couture gown for her that she can wear then cut into a minidress or a fantastic sleeping bag.”
Mary-Kate describes her casual attitude toward fashion this way: “I don’t know—you’re either on the worst-dressed list or you’ve started a fashion trend. I think there’s a real disconnect between the media’s perception of fashion and the fashion world’s idea of fashion. I don’t know why I wear some of the things I wear. I like wearing crazy things sometimes. I like being playful. Sometimes I feel like I’m playing dress-up and becoming a character. It’s sort of like an art. It can change your mood or the way that people are attracted to you.”
“Do you feel you’re sexy?” I ask. “The affirmations you get as a child star are so different from the ones I presume one seeks as a woman.”
“I feel like I can be sexy when I want to be,” she says. “I think all women are sexy. Some may feel it more than others. I personally think the women who are the most sexy are the women who are truly themselves, whatever that may be.”
Mary-Kate’s many bracelets jangle as she runs her multiringed hand across the words of the trapeze-school document. Poor thing, I think, even having fun is a contractual transaction. “Don’t worry. I kind of like reading the fine print,” she says, as if reading my mind as well while she squints at the legalese through the gigantic, round sunglasses that obscure her beauty and make her appear like a douroucouli with a rather devilish sense of fashion. “I’ve spent my whole life reading it,” she says, initialing the last box.
Mary Kate Olsen Elle July 2008
Believe me, trapeze school was Mary-Kate’s idea. I had e-mailed her a few days before and suggested we see the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha at the Met or peruse the Christian Louboutin show at the FIT museum. “I don’t know,” she tells me now, handing the release form back to the receptionist. “I was sitting in China, and I thought: trapeze class!” That one sentence—absurdly fabulous and fearless at once—pretty much sums up this 22-year-old child-woman in my presence. Again she reads my mind. “I know. Kooky, huh?” she confesses. “Almost crazy. Almost.” She kicks off her YSL heels and removes her sunglasses to stare up at the trapeze high above us with her lovely tired eyes. She contemplates the almost-craziness of it all. “I wonder what would happen if I just quit everything and joined the circus,” she says softly. “Honey, your life is enough of a circus already,” I tell her.“No shit,” she says.
“Mary-Kate is fragile yet strong,” says Diane von Furstenberg, whom Olsen interviewed for the upcoming coffee-table book Influence, an anthology of interviews, photographs, and artwork that she and Ashley are compiling as part of their publishing agreement with Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin’s Young Readers Group. Von Furstenberg, perhaps seeing a lot of herself in Mary-Kate—a fierce ambition tempered by empathy; a talent for business tethered to an artistic spirit—has become a kind of mentor for her. “She’s an old soul in a very young girl,” the designer says. “Hers is a story that has just begun.”
And yet its narrative has been a part of pop culture for all of her 22 years, ever since she and her sister alternated playing the role of Michelle Tanner on TV’s Full House from the age of nine months until they were nine. They parlayed that role through their childhoods and tween and teenage years into an array of business endeavors that formed the basis of Dualstar. When they were four years old, their father hired lawyer Robert Thorne to run the company; the twins ousted Thorne when they turned 18 and became copresidents themselves. It was Thorne who persuaded ABC to raise the toddlers’ Full House salary from $4,000 to $25,000 an episode; by the series’ end, they were reportedly up to $150,000 an episode. Their first ABC special was such a hit for the network that, at six, the twins earned executive producer credits, making them two of the youngest EPs ever. Thorne’s business negotiations on their behalf made merchandising history: 45 direct-to-video films that reportedly grossed more than $750 million, three musical videos that went multiplatinum, 14 albums, a website, a video game venture, a line of dolls from Mattel, a library of Olsen twin books, and a fashion line sold through Wal-Mart that included accessories and cosmetics that, according to news reports, made more than $500 million back in 2003. Now that they’re grown-ups, the Olsens are using their intrinsic fashion sense and business expertise to expand the success of the Row (launched in 2006) and Elizabeth and James (2007), which are sold at stores worldwide.
That’s the first ring of Mary-Kate’s three-ring-circus life: her role as fashion designer and savvy businesswoman. But at times it has seemed as if she has morphed into the product itself. “Oh, yeah,” she agrees. “The year before Ashley and I went to college, we thought, We’ve had it. We so needed a break. I just wanted a change.” Her parents—Dave, formerly a mortgage banker, and Jarnette, an ex–ballet dancer, who divorced when Mary-Kate and Ashley were nine—were understanding and knew it was time for their daughters to leave Sherman Oaks, California, and set out on a life of their own. Though anyone who allows infants to be cast on a sitcom could be accused of being a “stage parent,” Dave and Jarnette always insisted that Mary-Kate and Ashley experience a regular childhood; rather than having the girls tutored on sets, they enrolled them in Campbell Hall Episcopal School in North Hollywood. Plus, there were other children at home who ensured the girls wouldn’t be too spoiled; siblings have a way of not seeing other siblings as pampered stars. The twins have one older brother and a younger sister (for whom the line Elizabeth and James was named). Dave has two other children from his second marriage. “I grew up going to regular school and still have friends from that time in my life,” Mary-Kate says of her years at Campbell Hall. “And as crazy and hardworking as my life has been, my parents knew how important it was to have a normal life as well. I grew up in a big family. And although I was always surrounded by a lot of adults [in show business], my big hobby was horseback riding, so I was surrounded by all my horseback riding friends, too. I was surrounded by people who cared about me and loved me.”
Did she ever feel lonely when she and Ashley moved east to attend NYU? It was such a drastic break from her Southern California existence. “Everybody has their down times when they feel alone,” she tells me. “But I think alone time is good. When we were interviewing Diane [von Furstenberg] for our book, she said it’s important to take time for yourself in order to replenish yourself.”
The NYU experience wasn’t all great. When some of their fellow students began selling information about them to the tabloids, she and her sister no longer felt safe there. They returned to what they knew best: business.
Do profit motives complicate or even cause sibling rivalry? “We don’t agree all the time. The way we go about business or designing or making a decision is that we come at it from two completely different angles that at the end of the day, even when we don’t think we’re agreeing with each other, we are agreeing. We’re just getting there in different ways. Unless you’re a twin, you honestly can’t know how close twins can be. There’s such a strength, but that also makes it…” Her voice trails off. “When there’s that much love there’s…” Again she stops. She gives me a wan smile. I attempt to help her explain: When twins grow up and go their separate ways, is it like an amicable divorce? “Well, there’s the opposite of everything, but it stems from love, and it stems from passion. We’re driven people. I do know I can’t work in an office. Ashley, on the other hand, loves going to an office.”
Mary-Kate is considered the artsier of the two sisters. Her own fashion sense borders on the eccentric, but when everyone strives to look like everyone else, such individuality is what the fashion world sorely needs. In staking out her style she has become the latest in a long line of fashion It Girls that includes Suzy Parker, Ali MacGraw, Penelope Tree, Edie Sedgwick, and Isabella Blow. For some, the It-ness proved tragic. For others, it was their blue-bloodedness that caused the excitable covey known as the fashion flock to flutter about them. But Mary-Kate is an anomaly in this lineage. She is not only a tastemaker but also a taste macher. And yet she dresses with an abandon that borders on indifference. In fact, her style has been referred to as “bag-lady chic.” “Boho chic, you mean?” she asks. Whatever the word, her look is certainly singular and disproves the dictum that designer clothes must be worn by the deliriously tall, since Mary-Kate is barely five feet without the help of her YSL heels.
“I love a tiny woman in Chanel,” Karl Lagerfeld says. “Coco herself was tiny, so you don’t need to be a giant to look good in these. I like the way M.K. is mixing Chanel with other things. Life is not a fashion show, and I find a total designer look boring.”
Lauren Hutton, who modeled for the Row’s spring ’08 lookbook, says, “I feel like M.K. is a kindred spirit. She lives an experimental life. When you’re young, you should be trying on lots of things, not just clothes. She understands that. You’re not born with taste. That’s a bunch of hooey. Like everything else, taste is a process of discovery. I like that about her. She’s always discovering her tastes.”
Mary-Kate has an innate sense of style that follows no rules,” designer Giambattista Valli says. “Her personal style surpasses fashion. I’d like to design a couture gown for her that she can wear then cut into a minidress or a fantastic sleeping bag.”
Mary-Kate describes her casual attitude toward fashion this way: “I don’t know—you’re either on the worst-dressed list or you’ve started a fashion trend. I think there’s a real disconnect between the media’s perception of fashion and the fashion world’s idea of fashion. I don’t know why I wear some of the things I wear. I like wearing crazy things sometimes. I like being playful. Sometimes I feel like I’m playing dress-up and becoming a character. It’s sort of like an art. It can change your mood or the way that people are attracted to you.”
“Do you feel you’re sexy?” I ask. “The affirmations you get as a child star are so different from the ones I presume one seeks as a woman.”
“I feel like I can be sexy when I want to be,” she says. “I think all women are sexy. Some may feel it more than others. I personally think the women who are the most sexy are the women who are truly themselves, whatever that may be.”
olsen
In a dark corner of Manhattan's Gramercy Park Hotel, Mary-Kate Olsen sits alone smoking Marlboro Reds. Her blue eyes are the size of salad plates, her lips almost too large for her face. A black fedora is perched low over her shock of tangled blond hair. She's impossibly small, her garden-hose legs bottoming out into a pair of ridiculously high black Balenciaga ankle boots. When asked how often she wipes out in those, Olsen cocks a foot out from under the table and laughs agreeably. ''Oh, I fall all the time,'' she says, her little hand ashing her cigarette into a tiny silver pail already filling up with butts. ''But I could be in flats and fall.''
If she looks just like the overaccessorized doll from all her paparazzi shots — here drinking a latte! here wearing a silly scarf! — the surprise, then, is actually hearing her speak. Despite her being half of the Full House duo and the monstrously lucrative Mary-Kate and Ashley franchise, a 21-year-old who, as she'll repeat over and over again, has been working for 21 years, little is really known about Olsen. And if spending an afternoon with her is a trip, her ''evil eye'' rings and bracelets glinting up at you as she tells a story about an insomnia-induced hour of solo interpretive dance in her unfurnished apartment the other night, wait until she gets stoned and straddles Silas on the first of her 10 episodes on Showtime's Weeds (her arc premieres Sept. 17).
''If you look at our career,'' says Olsen, as if sister Ashley was sitting alongside her, ''from 21 years ago to today, it was about entertaining a specific audience. It wasn't about acting. It was about pleasing other people and making kids smile.'' When she was a freshman at NYU (she went for two years and holds out the possibility of returning to graduate), Olsen started taking acting classes, thinking of it for the first time as a creative pursuit instead of a business. Today, she admires young actresses such as Evan Rachel Wood and Ginnifer Goodwin, and hopes to slowly start booking supporting roles in independent movies. (In Jonathan Levine's just-wrapped The Wackness, she plays a young hippie who shares an onscreen kiss with Ben Kingsley, an experience Olsen calls ''very surreal and cool.'')
Being accepted into the Weeds family is Olsen's first real stab at credibility. ''To say that I got to work with those people — with Mary-Louise Parker! — is a great thing,'' she marvels. When series creator Jenji Kohan heard that Olsen was interested in playing the role of Tara, a sly Christian girl new to the neighborhood, she remembers worrying that Olsen's celebrity would be distracting to viewers. But Olsen's ease and chemistry with costar Hunter Parrish during the audition won her over. ''The truth is we're so protective of the show,'' says Kohan. ''We don't stunt-cast. She earned that part. It's weird to say that she's trying to break into the business, because of her status, but she is and she should have her shot. We did have to change our signs, though,'' she says, with an amused sigh. ''When we were on location, we couldn't have Weeds signs up because we would get stalkerazzi.''
There's a reason that Olsen looks so glum in every tabloid shot. ''I don't want my picture taken,'' she says simply. ''The only time I think it's okay is at a red-carpet event or a photo shoot. So every time I see paparazzi, I cover my face so they don't get a picture, and I'm just 'the mean person who doesn't smile.''' To maintain some semblance of privacy, she makes ''conscious decisions every day of my life.'' Don't get out of the car, keep the bodyguards close, steer clear of certain stores, invite friends over for dinner instead of meeting them at a restaurant, stay indoors. ''I would love to be able to swim in the ocean in Malibu,'' she says without bitterness. ''But that is asking for a bikini shot. That's inviting something that I don't want to happen. I don't need to be on a 'Who's Skinny, Who's Fat, Who's Looking Healthy, Who's Not Eating?' list.''
Three years ago, spurred on by the media's tickled horror over her rapidly diminishing figure, Olsen removed herself to a Utah rehab facility in order to treat her anorexia. ''There's definitely been times in my life when I just turned to people and said, 'I'm done, this is too much for me, this is too overwhelming,''' she says. She treats a question about her health today with genuine thoughtfulness. ''Mentally, physically, I feel pretty on top of my game right now,'' she says. ''Talk to me next week, I don't know. Today, I feel good.''
And with that, she stamps out her last cigarette and drapes herself around her interviewer in a girlishly exuberant goodbye hug. Back into the bright world she goes, wobbling away on her giant heels.
If she looks just like the overaccessorized doll from all her paparazzi shots — here drinking a latte! here wearing a silly scarf! — the surprise, then, is actually hearing her speak. Despite her being half of the Full House duo and the monstrously lucrative Mary-Kate and Ashley franchise, a 21-year-old who, as she'll repeat over and over again, has been working for 21 years, little is really known about Olsen. And if spending an afternoon with her is a trip, her ''evil eye'' rings and bracelets glinting up at you as she tells a story about an insomnia-induced hour of solo interpretive dance in her unfurnished apartment the other night, wait until she gets stoned and straddles Silas on the first of her 10 episodes on Showtime's Weeds (her arc premieres Sept. 17).
''If you look at our career,'' says Olsen, as if sister Ashley was sitting alongside her, ''from 21 years ago to today, it was about entertaining a specific audience. It wasn't about acting. It was about pleasing other people and making kids smile.'' When she was a freshman at NYU (she went for two years and holds out the possibility of returning to graduate), Olsen started taking acting classes, thinking of it for the first time as a creative pursuit instead of a business. Today, she admires young actresses such as Evan Rachel Wood and Ginnifer Goodwin, and hopes to slowly start booking supporting roles in independent movies. (In Jonathan Levine's just-wrapped The Wackness, she plays a young hippie who shares an onscreen kiss with Ben Kingsley, an experience Olsen calls ''very surreal and cool.'')
Being accepted into the Weeds family is Olsen's first real stab at credibility. ''To say that I got to work with those people — with Mary-Louise Parker! — is a great thing,'' she marvels. When series creator Jenji Kohan heard that Olsen was interested in playing the role of Tara, a sly Christian girl new to the neighborhood, she remembers worrying that Olsen's celebrity would be distracting to viewers. But Olsen's ease and chemistry with costar Hunter Parrish during the audition won her over. ''The truth is we're so protective of the show,'' says Kohan. ''We don't stunt-cast. She earned that part. It's weird to say that she's trying to break into the business, because of her status, but she is and she should have her shot. We did have to change our signs, though,'' she says, with an amused sigh. ''When we were on location, we couldn't have Weeds signs up because we would get stalkerazzi.''
There's a reason that Olsen looks so glum in every tabloid shot. ''I don't want my picture taken,'' she says simply. ''The only time I think it's okay is at a red-carpet event or a photo shoot. So every time I see paparazzi, I cover my face so they don't get a picture, and I'm just 'the mean person who doesn't smile.''' To maintain some semblance of privacy, she makes ''conscious decisions every day of my life.'' Don't get out of the car, keep the bodyguards close, steer clear of certain stores, invite friends over for dinner instead of meeting them at a restaurant, stay indoors. ''I would love to be able to swim in the ocean in Malibu,'' she says without bitterness. ''But that is asking for a bikini shot. That's inviting something that I don't want to happen. I don't need to be on a 'Who's Skinny, Who's Fat, Who's Looking Healthy, Who's Not Eating?' list.''
Three years ago, spurred on by the media's tickled horror over her rapidly diminishing figure, Olsen removed herself to a Utah rehab facility in order to treat her anorexia. ''There's definitely been times in my life when I just turned to people and said, 'I'm done, this is too much for me, this is too overwhelming,''' she says. She treats a question about her health today with genuine thoughtfulness. ''Mentally, physically, I feel pretty on top of my game right now,'' she says. ''Talk to me next week, I don't know. Today, I feel good.''
And with that, she stamps out her last cigarette and drapes herself around her interviewer in a girlishly exuberant goodbye hug. Back into the bright world she goes, wobbling away on her giant heels.
moments
+ New York Sex and the City thing - shopping, drinks, smoking, all in heels
+ Listen to Bob Marley in Jamaica on a beach with a j
+ See Led Zeppelin live
+ Sit front row at a fashion show
+ Snorkel naked somehwere in Oceania
+ Make out on the beach at night in Thailand (like in The Beach)
+ Learn how to hula
+ Be a groupie ahah
+ Kiss a movie star
+ Get published (no matter what it is)
+ Travel all around Africa
+ Get married, have a baby
+ Gamble - once
+ Go to a genuine American football/baseball/ice hockey game
+ Learn to skate board
+ Learn to snowboard
+ Go to a roller disco
+ Hang ten in Hawaii
+ Go skydiving
+ Own a horse
+ Live in the outback for a period of time
+ Live in a treehouse
+ Enter a beauty pageant
+ Finish at least one Jane Austen book. Pretend I enjoyed it
+ Go skinny-dipping in Iceland, then a sauna
+ Shear a sheep ahah
+ Go crowdsurfing
+ Eat a croissant in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower, with a cigarette, Chanel bag and beret.
+ Go to Dubai and buy gold in a souk
+ Drink mint tea and eat cous cous in Morrocco
+ Go to Zanzibar
+ Adopt A pet form a shelter
+ Establish my own business
+ Listen to Bob Marley in Jamaica on a beach with a j
+ See Led Zeppelin live
+ Sit front row at a fashion show
+ Snorkel naked somehwere in Oceania
+ Make out on the beach at night in Thailand (like in The Beach)
+ Learn how to hula
+ Be a groupie ahah
+ Kiss a movie star
+ Get published (no matter what it is)
+ Travel all around Africa
+ Get married, have a baby
+ Gamble - once
+ Go to a genuine American football/baseball/ice hockey game
+ Learn to skate board
+ Learn to snowboard
+ Go to a roller disco
+ Hang ten in Hawaii
+ Go skydiving
+ Own a horse
+ Live in the outback for a period of time
+ Live in a treehouse
+ Enter a beauty pageant
+ Finish at least one Jane Austen book. Pretend I enjoyed it
+ Go skinny-dipping in Iceland, then a sauna
+ Shear a sheep ahah
+ Go crowdsurfing
+ Eat a croissant in Paris in front of the Eiffel Tower, with a cigarette, Chanel bag and beret.
+ Go to Dubai and buy gold in a souk
+ Drink mint tea and eat cous cous in Morrocco
+ Go to Zanzibar
+ Adopt A pet form a shelter
+ Establish my own business
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