Great Outfits in Fashion History: Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen as Tweens in Floral Silk Sets

Are great designers born with elevated taste? Or is it something they learn through years of matching red carpet looks?

Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen at the Audrey Hepburn for Children Family Film Festival in 1997.

There are perfectly good celebrity style moments, and then there are the looks that really stick with you, the ones you try desperately to recreate at home. In ‘Great Outfits in Fashion History,’ Fashionista editors are revisiting their all-time favorite lewks.

Are great designers born with elevated taste? Or is it something they learn through years of matching red carpet looks? For Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, it may be the latter.

The creative directors of The Row grew up in the public eye, often wearing complementary ensembles to enhance their twinness. Many of their adolescent looks wouldn’t fit in with the wealthy minimalist aesthetic that they’ve built their fashion empire on, but there are some outfits from their youth that hinted at their sartorial brilliance.

The duo attended a film festival in Hollywood in 1997 in floral silk sets, consisting of sleeveless button-down tops and slip skirts — one in black, the other in cream. Though their base palette was different, everything else, down to their Anna Wintour-esque bobs to their small rectangular flat lens sunglasses, was the same. Did wearing well-tailored satin separates as tweens have some underlying influence on their expensive line of loose-fitting crêpe basics and suiting? Not no, I hypothesize.

Okay, this may be a stretch, but the fact that this look closely resembles a floral-pattern satin dress from Paco Rabanne‘s Spring 2019 that I’ve been lusting after tells me that I should lean into the ’90s tween aesthetic. If you’d also like to take style cues from kids that predated TikTok, then shop the gallery, below.