Cathy Horyn & The Olsens

I've been so looking forward to reading Cathy Horyn's much anticipated interview the The Olsens' about their line The Row. And it does not disappoint - revealing, mature, measure. And most surprisingly, the notoriously hard to please Horyn seems genuinely impressed.

Very few celebrities are either so fascinating or appalling that they manage to get under our skins, as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have, and it may be because they are twins. Yet their success in a field as competitive as fashion is impossible to deny...

“I think the way to think about The Row is that it offers the perfect blank — the perfect schoolboy blazer, the perfect leather leggings, the perfect peacoat. So many designers are intent on the next great trend that some of the basics are neglected.”...

Mary-Kate added, “Also, I think you design things because maybe it’s not you.” She paused. “I have my own pet peeves about things that I don’t wear.”

Like what?

Ashley started to laugh.

“Like tank tops,” Mary-Kate said.

“You’ll never see her in a tank top,” Ashley said...

“I think Ashley has an old soul,” said Ms. Siskin, their partner in Elizabeth and James. “That’s really what it is. She’s not as good with the whole celebrity thing as people might think. She’s longs for a bit of a normal life.”

“Our lives have been kind of backward. We never got that opportunity in high school to figure out what you want to do. We never had the time to discover, ‘Oh, I love doing this ...’ So for us this experience in fashion has been amazing.”

Image Source: The Row

Interview: NY Times