The Olsens Did Not Tell You to Look Like This

Y'all bought the foundation and then forgot to build. Oops!

I get very tired of the Internet sometimes. It can be a terrifying circle jerk, especially for people who care about fashion — a real psyop of confirmation bias. And while the middling sameness can be comforting (nothing wrong with being like the other girls), we have to be conscious that the lack of friction stunts our collective creative growth. Spoon-feeding each other trends like baby birds can’t be the only way we’re fed.

The Internet makes stars of regular girls every day. Every so often, someone with a point of view so singular punctures the artifice and whooshes through the consciousness like a fat gust of the freshest air. Slowly at first, then all at once, others clamor to copy her, and she makes a comfortable living off the other women hoping to capture a little piece of her magic. She takes a 9% affiliate cut on 75 pairs of $400 jeans and uses it to buy a better life to emulate, and the next thing for everyone else to chase. I don't think this is a bad thing. The monetization of girlhood has uncuffed a lot of women from a much narrower life.

It's when it all becomes one amalgamous swirl that I get fatigued. Eventually, these people are copied at such volume that there's no path but to become a genre of their own.

The Row is a perfect example of this phenomenon — women so rabidly emulated that packaging their ideals was the clearest and most gratifying path forward.

The Olsen neophytes online have created a reductive subgenre of minimalist Internet entirely taken directly from their twin idols. Fandom is fun, and they are right that The Row is a brand for clothing nerds (like me) who tuck into inane details to justify the cost of what we're subscribing to. I’m not clowning these girls; they’ve removed the thinking from getting dressed, and a lot of people want exactly that. I just wonder if they’re missing the broader point of what the Olsens set out to do.

Walk into The Row’s Upper East Side townhouse, and you’re coaxed into a space designed in such good taste it’s lost most of its flavor. It is soothing. It is elevated. It is you, just a few grand away from your best self. Vanilla is comforting, safe, quiet. I like vanilla. It soothes me. Vanilla can fix everything. I want vanilla sometimes, too.

But I don’t think vanilla is what The Row set out to do entirely. The brand was founded on the hypothesis of the perfect white t-shirt and named for London’s Savile Row. The co-founders’ diminutive size no doubt forced them to think creatively about tailoring as they began collecting as teens. Adulthood arrives, and there you have it: simple things, impeccably made.

But a white t-shirt isn’t the centerpiece of a wardrobe. It’s a canvas. It’s meant to shapeshift and act as the quarterback for the more important parts of a look. It’s perfectly tasty vanilla on its own, but it’s begging for some sprinkles.

It makes me wonder if Ashley and Mary Kate Olsen weren’t trying to be the entire message of your wardrobe, but to provide the best possible foundation for it. The twins themselves rarely step out in their pragmatic pieces alone — they accessorize recklessly and collect vintage with obvious joy. Their clothes are worldly. They choose things with provenance, history, and humor. Everything they pick shares a similar sense of ease, but the brand echoes their own analog natures: The Row’s assortment isn’t meant to be the center of attention, but rather to hold up the pieces that are.

They all but tell us this in their own whispered way. Collaborating with stores like Desert Vintage and Preclothed isn’t a money tree waiting to be plucked. It’s a world-building move, a nudge in the direction of what they hold to be true on their own. Maybe the reveal of Mary Kate and Oliver Sarkozy’s Hamptons home — all art and color — will give purists permission to tiptoe out of The Row’s black box and use it as the canvas intended.

The Row triggers people for the same reason it seduces them: it is a brand that asks you to know better. The prices are not a secret, the logo is not on the bag, and there is no flex available to anyone who hasn’t already opted into the conversation. To the seduced, this is the appeal. To the triggered, it is the most galling kind of class signaling, precisely because it refuses to announce itself. Both camps are responding to the same thing: the brand’s refusal to do any of the work for you. But to read The Row solely as a status object — whether you’re buying in or rolling your eyes — is to make the same mistake as the disciples in the black box.

You can glide along the surface of fashion forever if you want. Shop, consume, chase. There’s pleasure in it. But the people who actually move me are not the ones who took the swatch home and painted the whole house with it. They’re the ones who looked at the swatch and went somewhere else entirely. You can dissect your closet into an analytical formula of color theory, capsules, and rules all you want, but I think the best outfits have a degree of cooking from the hip.

I collect art with a voracity I rarely share here. The painters and photographers whom I love do more for the way I get dressed than any lookbook ever has. Not because I’m trying to translate a Currin bosom into an outfit, but because spending time with someone else’s specific, weird, fully-formed point of view reminds me that I’m supposed to have one too. Nobody hangs a blank white canvas on a wall.

The Gala pant isn’t the problem or the solution; it’s a springboard. The problem is stopping at the Gala pant. The solution is whatever you find when you keep going.