Growing up in the 1990s, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were undisputed pop culture royalty. Getting their start on Full House when they were just 9 months old, America immediately fell in love with the twins who starred as the adorably sassy Michelle Tanner on the hit sitcom for eight seasons.
From there, the sisters went on to dominate the straight-to-VHS market, their smiling faces and iconic tween style (Tankinis! Butterfly clips!) enough to sell even the most outrageous plotline. They were named the youngest self-made millionaires in history by the time they were 10, and in 2004, they launched their Walmart collection of clothes and accessories, which raked in an estimated $700 million in sales thanks to millennials who either wanted to befriend them or be them.
By the mid-aughts, the diminutive former child stars had reached bona fide A-list status. They became fashion It Girls, gracing the covers of Vogue and Rolling Stone while partying with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. As famous as they were, they started to conjure up an air of mystery, nearly disappearing behind their oversize sweaters and giant Balenciaga bags as they walked the streets of NYC with their signature single-cup venti Starbucks lattes and cigarettes in hand.
But in 2006 — at the height of their popularity — the siblings began a slow but sure-footed retreat from the spotlight. They stepped back from acting (the last movie they did together was 2004’s New York Minute) and launched their successful high-end fashion line, The Row. They rarely do interviews and make few public appearances, yet the public remains unflinchingly fascinated by the twin sisters they lost: What are their lives like? Are they close? Do they still smoke so much? Are they happy?
Us Weekly talked to 20 sources — from members of the Olsens’ inner circle to current and former employees to people they used to party with in NYC — to get insight into their second act.
“Being in the spotlight as little kids really seems to have impacted how Mary-Kate and Ashley live their adult lives,” one friend tells Us of the sisters, who turned 38 in June. Adds a former nightlife promoter: “For being child stars, they have come out of [all] this pretty well. It could’ve been so much worse.”
The Hollywood Machine
Mary-Kate and Ashley were just infants when they began their careers on Full House and didn’t miss a beat when it came to parlaying their popularity into different projects. After the show ended in 1995, they started making tween-friendly movies, music, video games, books and more.
“There was no precedent for what we did,” their former publicist, Michael Pagnotta, tells Us, noting that Mary-Kate and Ashley were the bosses from an early age. “They were in charge. When they decided to bail on all the entertainment stuff and move into fashion, I think that’s why they felt they had some credibility.”
In 2004, they moved to New York to attend NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where Ashley focused on business management and Mary-Kate pursued a creative discipline in order to set themselves up to run fashion brands. They became fixtures on the NYC scene.
“Mary-Kate and Ashley both gravitated toward the downtown fashion gays,” says a fashion insider who hung out with them in the early 2000s. “Mary-Kate was like this eccentric bag lady smoking Marlboro Reds with all the boys, having fun at dive-y hotspots like the Beatrice Inn and the Jane Hotel. Ashley was much straighter and sensible, but she loved fashion and was intrigued by us.”
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Their love lives made headlines — Mary-Kate and Hilton famously fought over Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos, while Ashley embarked on an on-off romance with Jared Leto — as did Mary-Kate’s weight (she spent time in a treatment facility in 2004). The attention was overwhelming.
“Mary-Kate was very clear about hating the paparazzi and the public nature of what her career as a child star had brought her,” says a Hamptons insider who spent time with her during her marriage to 55-year-old Olivier Sarkozy. (Mary-Kate filed for divorce from the French businessman in 2020 after nearly five years of marriage.) “She felt hounded. It was too much to handle.”
Different Direction
Pagnotta tells Us Mary-Kate and Ashley knew it was time to change paths. “All the attention they got was a lot for them. It was a matter of their mental, emotional, spiritual and physical well-being that dictated that, you know, we need to pick a new direction.”
Few who know Mary-Kate and Ashley were surprised about them shunning showbiz — the former nightlife promoter says they were never much for schmoozing. “They were always a bit different. Mary-Kate had a little bit more spunk. Paris, Lindsay and Nicole [Richie] were dancing on tables, but Mary-Kate and Ashley [would] sit by themselves at a table in the corner. Even when they were on the scene, they were very private.”
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Low-Key Lives
Their current scene is vastly different. “Ashley and Mary-Kate run in some very high-end circles,” reveals a source who recently sold Ashley some art pieces at the Park Avenue Armory show for the pair’s London office. “Everyone they interacted with at the Armory show was a wealthy European,” the source says, adding that Mary-Kate and Ashley are both “very well-versed in art, both historical and modern-day.”
While Ashley is still based in NYC, Mary-Kate splits her time in L.A., and they both travel frequently to Europe for work and spend a good deal of time in the Hamptons. Mary-Kate was spotted with longtime friend (and ex-boyfriend) Sean Avery outside The Row’s Amagansett location over Memorial Day weekend. “She loves the Hamptons, riding horses and just being in nature,” says the first friend.
Ashley and her husband, artist Louis Eisner, are also regularly spotted around town. “They spend a lot of their time out here,” a Hamptons resident says of the couple, who wed in December 2022 and welcomed son Otto last August.
In April, the local saw the duo at the gourmet shop Loaves and Fishes, where they spent $600 on groceries, including a $100 lobster salad. The pair were in Martha’s Vineyard on July 9, where Ashley supported Eisner, 34, at his Persona Non Grata exhibition at Winter Street Gallery.
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“They looked really happy,” an eyewitness tells Us. “Ashley was walking around the art show admiring his work. She appeared to be in a great mood, saying hello to people in the gallery and even had a smile.”
A second friend tells Us Mary-Kate and Ashley are “very low-key and kinda boring nowadays. They’ve given up smoking and stopped going out for a while. Ashley also had a baby, so her priorities are different; nobody sees them as much as they used to.”
Adds the first friend: “They’re homebodies who would rather go over line sheets for The Row than be out on the town. And they’re extremely cautious of who they let in and what they divulge in public.”
The sisters remain on good terms with their former Full House costars. In 2022, they reunited with the core cast, including Dave Coulier, Candace Cameron Bure and Jodie Sweetin, to attend their TV dad Bob Saget’s funeral.
A week after Ashley welcomed her son, John Stamos congratulated her on Instagram, writing in part, “Watching Mary-Kate and Ashley grow into the incredibly bright and remarkable women they are today has been one of the greatest joys of my life.”
Hard at Work
The Row is their passion. The understated luxury line from the formerly hyper-branded sisters is said to generate between $200 and $300 million in sales annually thanks to their sought-after cashmere sweaters and perfectly tailored trousers.
The twins work full-time on the business, though neither designs the clothes. (A former employee and fashion veteran says this is normal: “No one at that level takes a pencil and does a sketch.”) Mary-Kate is more involved with the creative, while Ashley spends more time on operations and finance.
Their staff respect their vision and commitment to producing high-quality clothes and regard them as gifted. During meetings, they speak so quietly that they almost whisper.
“It was a bit of a nightmare,” admits a former senior employee. “You have to learn to interpret the way they move their hands because sometimes that gives you more of an indication as to what they want the garment to look like.”
Behind the scenes, they’re big on secrecy. A New York fashion designer tells Us anyone entering their office building has to sign an NDA, and the former employee says Ashley never announced her pregnancy to her employees. She’s also known to avoid confrontation — which explains why she, with her sister’s support, led the initiative to lay off the majority of The Row’s staff in 2020, around the beginning of the pandemic, over email.
A former higher-up says Mary-Kate and Ashley “don’t trust anyone.” Once, after an intern tried to take a photo of the sisters in the showroom, interns were banned from the space. Ashley also dislikes dissenting opinions and can tire of employees quickly. She maintains more of a work-life balance than Mary-Kate, who the source says “would be completely lost without work and horse riding.”
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“I think at some point, they wanted to prove something,” says one of the former employees about what drives Mary-Kate and Ashley to work so hard. “Because they were TV stars when they were kids, no one really took them seriously when they launched the collection. Now it’s really the only celebrity collection that’s relevant.”
Judy Swartz, the former VP of Dualstar, tells Us she’s absolutely not surprised by their success: “They are smart, talented businesswomen.”
End Game
The irony, of course, is that even nearly two decades after ditching their girls-next-door accessibility to fade into the background of a high-fashion label, fans remain endlessly intrigued by the Olsens. They’re still making bank, too: Today, the sisters’ combined net worth is estimated at $500 million.
Veteran fashion marketing executive Ana Andjelic, who writes the influential Sociology of Business newsletter, says the twins’ secrecy is a big part of The Row’s success. “They consider it bad taste to be seen in public,” Andjelic says of Mary-Kate and Ashley, who don’t appear on the brand’s Instagram page and opted to ban cellphones at The Row’s February 28 Paris fashion show.
Adds a fashion insider who’s worked with the Olsens: “[The clothes], the events and the marketing are all elegant, understated and discreet, and so are they.”
A return to acting isn’t in the cards. “We’ve been there, we’ve done that, we started out that way,” Mary-Kate told Vogue in 2019. “This is the way we chose to move forward in our lives: to not be in the spotlight, to really have something that speaks for itself.”
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Those who have a history with the Olsens tell Us they’re exactly where they’re meant to be. “Ashley and Mary-Kate ditched Hollywood for fashion and found their happy place,” says another source.
Pagnotta believes the sisters have come full circle: “They were never attention seekers, and they still aren’t,” explains Pagnotta. “It seems like they’ve just become who they always were.”
For more on the Olsen twins, watch the exclusive video above and pick up the latest issue of Us Weekly, on newsstands now.
With reporting by Travis Cronin, Andrea Simpson and Amanda Williams