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The Ellen DeGeneres Show, September 2010

Discussing attending business meetings at age ten.

“And it's a completely different language, you know, learning about finances and branding and there's so many different elements to the process to creating something.” —Ashley Olsen

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“That was amazing, we have it framed in the office.” —Mary-Kate Olsen

“We did three different covers and every cover [had] your outfits [from The Row].” —Ellen DeGeneres to Mary-Kate and Ashley (September 2010)

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MTV VMAs, 2003

Mary-Kate Olsen, David Spade, and Ashley Olsen presenting the award for Best Pop Video (Justin Timberlake - Cry Me A River).

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2012 CFDA Fashion Awards

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, The Row's first win.

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MTV VMAs, 2004

“Before we get started with this introduction, I'd just like to say ‘thank you’ to everyone who've been very supportive of me over the past couple of months.” —Mary-Kate Olsen

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GQ Magazine, 2002

Part II.

On the other hand, I said, you could argue that the twins exist mainly to make money for adults like Thorne and Zimmerman. Thorne rose to the defense: The Olsens have made plenty of money for themselves. "They're set for life, and their great-grandchildren are set for life. I don't know if that's bad. They're filthy rich and control the biggest kid-entertainment empire in the history of the world. So yeah, adults are making money, but no one's making as much as they are." [..] The only thing Thorne couldn't tell me is what the empire he created meant. He kept talking about the "Olsen brand" and its aspirational qualities. I wondered what the Olsen brand was supposed to represent. Most brands have a slogan, I told him, something that wraps up in a sentence what the brand is about. What were Mary-Kate and Ashley about? Aha! He said. Somebody in the office had come up with a slogan. Wrote it down on a napkin. He flung open his door and screamed into the hallway, "What was that slogan?!" No one could remember. Though he couldn't recall the term, he did try to explain what the Olsens symbolized: "They're real beauty for real girls, the fashion is real for real girls, the magazine is real talk, the dolls...are really dolls....real books. The point of all that is, it's all about real." And what of the real girls? It's easy to forget the actual girls in this brand empire, since they do so much representing and signifying. I had to interview them over the phone - they lead very busy, very normal lives, Jill Zimmerman kept telling me, they have school and shopping and boys. They get massages. They fly to London, Paris and Venice for their movies. Normal, normal, normal. They're normal girls. Maybe that should be their slogan. Mary-Kate spoke to me from the innocence of her bed. Both her and her sister were sweet and adorable, as I knew they would be. Ashley more grounded and savvy, Mary-Kate more sparkly. "Mary-Kate and Ashley are not the kind of people who go to nightclubs like Drew Barrymore," said Ashley. "I do everything else that other kids my age would do," said Mary-Kate, "even though I wouldn't know." Back at the offices of Dualstar, Thorne became more obsessed about finding a slogan that defined the Olsen essence. He disappeared for a long while, leaving me alone in his office, then suddenly barged back in with an absent look on his face, like Uncle Billy having lost the money in "It's a Wonderful Life". "We'll find it! But anyway, what defines them is that they're number one. They're number one in every category - fashion, videos, magazines. And why - what does it mean? It's entertaining- real fashion, really cool stuff. I don't know if it's any deeper. This one sentence says it all, and we'll find it."

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GQ Magazine, 2002

CW: It's kind of disgusting. It's a window to the way female starlets were viewed and treated prior to the era of online presence, even at fifteen.

"They're normal girls who lead normal lives," said Robert Thorne about the Olsen twins he helped create. "They have friends who are fat, short, dumpy. The only difference between them and the other girls is next year they're buying a jet." Thorne is the force - a sort of manager/agent/marketer - behind the $500 million industry that is the Olsen Twins. [...] They are a living, breathing brand. And they have Robert Thorne to thank. Actually, he does a fairly good job of thanking himself: "The thing I want to say, it's very important, they brought nothing to table except popularity and charisma, and I brought marketing and really phenomenal deal-marketing." At 47, Thorne only has a thin hash of hair in an unusual place - on the middle of his forehead. It stitches its way across his brow like an old scar. He used to be the Olsen family lawyer. Now he works almost exclusively on all things Mary-Kate and Ashley. He spends a lot of time pacing his 12th floor office in Century City - you can see the green Herbalife sign flickering down on him - brainstorming and jangling his coins. As soon as he gets an idea, no matter how small, he flings the door open and shouts it out into the hallway, "A coke!" Or if he sees something that besmirches Mary-Kate and Ashley's honor, he's on the phone. "Hello? Hi, Brian. I just saw a movie, a teen-snowboarder movie, yesterday, Out Cold, and at the end this guy has a certain part of his anatomy hurt- there's two of 'em. Ok, his 'thing' gets caught in a jacuzzi- and he walks into a bar that night kind of dragging, and says,'Gee, my Mary-Kate and Ashley are really hurting'... Now, is that ok?" Jill Zimmerman walked in, the twins' 32 year old ex-nanny, a blond in a slit denim skirt chewing on a salad. Zimmerman has gone from au pair to executive of the company. She controls the girls' shopping (they live to shop!) and school schedule. What's unusual is that the two directly deal with the girls, not through their parents, who have divorced and share custody of the children. The twins live in San Fernando Valley, but in a larger sense their home is in Century City. The company has become their family and little Mary-Kate and Ashley are growing up in it. What the twins have evolved into- or what their particular talent is, is another question. Their talent is almost beside the point now - a confection of teen identity, something poached from their puberty and increasingly indistinguishable from it. I asked Thorne and Zimmerman if they agreed that the girls are now selling early teen sexuality. "They're attractive," said Thorne, "and more and more boys are buying their movies because they're hot looking, but there's nothing sexual about their content. It's scintilling because of beauty, because of sexy dress, but they don't overdo it." "They won't," said Zimmerman. But it's obvious: They're the object of horndog jokes in Maxim and on Howerd Stern. "What are you going to do?" said Zimmerman.

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GQ Magazine, 2002

“I can tell you our lives are a much more interesting story than Full House.” —Ashley Olsen (Influence, 2008)

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Oprah, 2008

Do you comment on who she's seeing, or do you have something to say about who she chooses to be with?

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Allure Backstage, February 2008

Mary-Kate Olsen at Paris Fashion Week for the Giambattista Valli Fall/Winter 2008/2009 Collection.

MKO: What makes a woman chic? GV: When she doesn't represent anybody else. When she is just herself. Chic is when a woman is in harmony with herself. I hate everything that is artificial bullshit, in a direction that is not you, that you're pushing to be someone else. Just accept who you are and work on it. —Influence (2008)

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Teen Vogue (October 2003)

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Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle Premiere, June 2003

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen

“Until we were 13 or 14, if my sister and I did an appearance, we would be wearing the same outfit. [laughs] It would be the same dress and we’d fight over who would wear it in red and who would wear it in black. That was obviously for work. But ever since I can remember, we dressed completely differently. Ashley would wear really baggy clothes and shoes that were too big for her, and I think my first favorite clothing item was a pair of spandex shorts with fringe on them! Leopard and white spandex. Ashley was more into florals and baggier clothes. So, I guess things don’t change that much. [laughs] But I remember the first time we were really able to choose our own clothes for an event was at the Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle [2003] premiere... I chose to wear this Zandra Rhodes dress—now I’ve collected a lot of her pieces—and I put a diamond butterfly brooch in my hair. You know, that’s still one of my top favorite looks. But I think that started at an age when it was okay for Ashley and me to look different. It was still about pleasing our audiences and making that connection between seeing us out in person, but doing it in a fashionable way... Or trying to anyway ” —Mary-Kate Olsen (Interview Magazine, February 2009)

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2015 CFDA Fahion Awards

Womenswear Designer of the Year

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New York Minute, dir. Dennie Gordon (2004)

The stage dive...

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The Olsen Sisters, 2021 / 2004

Off Camera with Sam Jones / Late Show with David Letterman

Elizabeth: Something my sisters always say... which might have come from my father at one point? - Mary-Kate: That means if you're younger and you don't want to work, you say, 'no.' Ashley: As you get older, you have control over the sort of things that you wanna do. As we've gotten older, we've definitely had control of everything that we've wanted to do.