Thefrenchy
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2006
- Messages
- 12,004
- Reaction score
- 1,238
the article...
from ELLE.COM
from ELLE.COM
THE TAO OF MARY KATE
On the set or off, in business, in fashion, and in life, Mary-Kate Olsen seems to float effortlessly above the craziness.
By Kevin Sessums
Photographed by Carter Smith
Styled by Joe Zee
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.
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 nuts,” 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.”
