As two of the most successful examples from various fields — former child actors, fashion designers, co-CEOs, etc. — Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have been tag-team monoliths in the worlds of pop culture and business for nearly as long as they’ve been alive. But even though they’ve achieved so many goals as a duo, that doesn’t mean they always want to be viewed through such a generalized lens. And it’s being dubbed nicknames like “the girls” that apparently help inspire them to stay out of the spotlight.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen turned 37 in 2023, with their combined net worth reportedly cresting somewhere around $500 million, and that money wasn’t made by balking on their values and settling for less. Which is why they’ve maintained the same semi-anonymous approach to their wildly successful brand The Row, with Mary-Kate telling Financial Times that she still gets bothered with the way they’re viewed and spoken about by others. In her words:
There’s certain words. Like referring to my sister and I as ‘The Olsen twins’ or ‘The Twins’ or ‘The Girls’. We’re 37 years old. We have had very interesting lives. We work together. We’re business partners. We’re sisters. I think that’s the first thing that comes to mind.
To her point that they’re not a singular unit, Ashley Olsen added a new member of her still-burgeoning family last year, reportedly having a baby boy in August 2023, around nine months after marrying her long-time love Louis Eisner. Can’t talk about that wonderful life moment by starting a sentence with "the twins."
Mary-Kate Olsen continued, implying the generalizing and infantalizing nature of the language helped turn them away from being central to The Row's marketing and promotion.
How many other people are called ‘the girls’ when they’re designing? I think that’s where the disappointment comes from. And that’s why we feel like the product should just speak for itself.
While it would be impossible to pinpoint exact causes, I can only speculate that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's explosive success as ubiquitous child stars throughout the 1990s and early 2000s helped to cement the public's conceptualization problems. Language habits sadly die as hard as any.
Though Full House's Michelle was only one character, co-stars like John Stamos, Candace Cameron-Bure, Dave Coulier have talked about the TGIF sitcom so much over the years, and often talk about them as "the girls" or "the twins" when speaking about them at that young age. And that talk only intensified during the years when Fuller House was airing, as neither Mary-Kate nor Ashley Olsen returned to reprise the role of the youngest Tanner sister. For my money, Jodie Sweetin voiced the most logical reason for it, but it's entirely possible that neither one of them wanted to face a Netflix-sized burst of new fans sticking with old nicknames.
But it's not as if either of The Row's privacy-embracing co-founders are without a sense of humor regarding their lack of publicity. As Mary-Kate put it when asked about their social media gameplan:
There was a conversation. It wasn’t very long, and it ended up working out quite well. Ashley and I are not on Instagram. [Grins.] So that’s the story of Instagram.
Even when they're not the main point of focus, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are still an ever-present force in the zeitgeist. Most recently, they've entered into speculation over Taylor Swift’s upcoming album The Tortured Poets Department, with one of our biggest questions so far centering on what it could mean that Swift is donning a pair of The Row's undies on the proposed album cover. Or was that just a low-key nod to poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau?
