Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen Explain Why They Keep Their Lives ‘Discreet’ In Rare Interview

Fraternal twins Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen have been out of the spotlight since they walked away from their careers as child stars in 2010. Now, at 35 years old, the pair is opening about their very “discreet” private life and why they kept it that way. 

In a rare interview with i-D magazine about the 15-year anniversary of their fashion line, The Row, Mary-Kate and Ashley explained that keeping their personal lives private is largely due to how they grew up.

“We were raised to be discreet people,” Mary-Kate said when asked about The Row’s low-key and classic style. “I think that potentially that’s just our aesthetic, our design preference,” Ashley chimed in.

Ashley continued, “But that doesn’t mean that we don’t also appreciate something truly ornate or maximal. Sometimes a collection even starts quite like that, and then gets pared down. It doesn’t always start from that simplistic place.”

The duo also revealed why they didn’t want their names to be associated with their fashion label. “We didn’t want to be in front of it. We didn’t necessarily even want to let people know it was us,” Ashley said. “It was really about the product, to the point where we were like, ‘Who could we get to front this so that we don’t have to?'”

“We’re hard workers and we’ve always been hard workers,” Mary-Kate added. “I think the reason we do fashion is to constantly try to fix our imperfections. And you have next season to do that. But it’s also our job to find every imperfection in there to make sure that we’re constantly pushing ourselves and training our eyes and making sure everyone is served. Just evolving and learning.”

Mary-Kate and Ashley retired from acting in the late 2000s and have since focused on growing their fashion brand and other ventures. They chose not to participate in the Full House Netflix reboot, which ran from 2016 to 2020. 

The twins’ younger sister, Elizabeth, is an actress famous for her role as Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the April 2021 digital issue of Glamour UK, Elizabeth, 32, admitted that she considered changing her last name in 1999 to distance herself from her famous siblings. 

“During that time, I thought ‘I don’t want to be associated with [Mary-Kate and Ashley]’, for some reason,” she shared. “I guess I understood what nepotism was like inherently as a 10-year-old. I don’t know if I knew the word, but there is some sort of association of not earning something that I think bothered me at a very young age.”

The Avengers Endgame star said she was going to refer to herself as Elizabeth Chase instead (the latter is her middle name). “It had to do with my own insecurities,” she said while reflecting on her past.