“Everything Mary-Kate and Ashley do turns to gold,” The Row’s then–production manager (now vice president of sourcing and production), Joe Karban, commented in The New York Times in 2009. “It’s much like the old days at Polo,” the veteran continued. “The kids on the team are really passionate about making clothes. How do you set a proper sleeve? How does a fabric perform? It’s the art of making clothes as opposed to making everything cookie-cutter.”

Roughly four decades after Ralph Lauren got started with what’s been called “the perfect tie,” Ashley and her twin sister, Mary-Kate, cofounded The Row with an idea for the perfect T-shirt. And just as Lauren dubbed his New York–born label Polo, after a terribly British sport, Mary-Kate and Ashley named their Garment District baby The Row, deliberately sidestepping the cliché of the celebrity-founded line to invoke the high-class quality of London’s Savile Row, the street known for bespoke men’s tailoring.

But what drives The Row’s surprising success is the intimate relationship between Mary-Kate’s creative yin (“She has spirit, taste, and modernity,” designer Karl Lagerfeld noted in Vogue. “She mixes Chanel in her own way”) and Ashley’s entrepreneurial yang (when she was in her teens, the older-by-less-than-five-minutes alpha twin named Martha Stewart as an idol in Vanity Fair “because of, like, everything she’s created within her brand”).

With no formal training, the young designers learned their craft hands-on from years spent on the sets of TV series, from Full House to Two of a Kind, scrutinizing the wardrobe department’s handiwork in tailoring garments for their petite frames. “There would be five or six racks of clothes there,” Mary-Kate told Vogue in 2011, “and they cut them down to fit us—even Chanel.”

Fashion’s mini moguls were 10-year-old millionaires, and at 18, took control of Dualstar, the company founded when they were 6 that controls their vast entertainment catalog and growing clothing empire. The Row is the jewel in its diversified crown, a luxurious, high-end label. Covering the contemporary fashion market, they offer a line called Elizabeth and James; and for the mass market, Olsenboye, affordably priced at JCPenney, focuses on the latest tween trends.

The Row

Spring/Summer 2023 • Womenswear

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