Why the Olsen Twins reinventions were also ours
From Full House to The Row and everything we became in between.
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Over the weekend Mary-Kate and Ashley turned 40 and the algorithms were celebrating wholeheartedly.
Overnight my feed transformed into a photo album of their entire lives. Present-day rare spottings in The Row on the streets of New York. Sidelines at the most admired fashion shows. Then a leap back to perfect curls from Holiday in the Sun and pigtail buns from Billboard Dad to bubble gum clips from It Takes Two. The algorithm aging backwards in real time. The movie era blended into Full House and Full House brought me to baby MK&A. In minutes I had scrolled through forty years of a very familiar friend: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Like many women reading this I have lived through every one of these eras right alongside them.
To the point where we were so influenced by them that we weren’t just observing their lives.. we’ve been vicariously living pieces of our own alongside theirs.
Mary-Kate and Ashley are one of the most visible, documented examples of reinvention we have.
In the best way too. The quiet, intentional, fully committed kind. With them there’s never been a big announcement or rebrand. Just a completely different version of themselves, every few years, with total confidence and conviction in their output. And each time it never looked like a reinvention. It just looked like.. them.
So here’s the part that I think matters for us.
If you’ve felt connected to every single one of their eras. Inspired by each season they’ve entered, by the version of them that came right when you needed it.. I don’t think that’s just admiration. I think it’s been a mirror. Showing us that their reinventions resonating with us at each stage meant that we’ve been reinventing too. We just may not see it in real time.
Reinvention rarely feels like reinvention from the inside. And we know this. It usually just feels like the next thing. The next interest, the next chapter, the next version of what we’re building. We recognize it in retrospect or by watching someone else do it so clearly that we finally see ourselves in the reflection.
And that’s what they’ve given us. A mirror into the four decades of our reinvention.
As one of those millennial women fully indoctrinated into the Olsen empire, I can relate.
I remember being under the age of 5 and sitting in front of the tv watching Full House while my older brother was at preschool. Three o’clock when it aired was a sacred time. It was my time. My show. My Tanner family.
And I remember getting irrationally frustrated when he’d come home loud and energetic because he was interrupting Michelle Tanner.
To me she wasn’t a television character. She was someone I spent time with every day.
Then around eight years old, I remember my mom sat me down to tell me something that completely rocked my world.
“Honey.. this is the last time you’re going to see them on television.”
I can still picture where we were standing when she said it. You know those traditional 90s homes where the living rooms had a full step down from the kitchen? There.
She said it almost like she was bracing me for impact. She was fully aware this was going to be a big deal for me.
And it was because I didn’t understand. Were they dying? Was Michelle okay? Why wouldn’t I see them again?
Kids today will never understand what television felt like in the 90s. We didn’t have streaming services. We couldn’t just decide we wanted to revisit Season 3 on a random Tuesday.
When a show stopped making episodes, it simply disappeared. Unless a network decided to run reruns years later, that really was goodbye.
The final episode felt a little like a funeral. Like you were saying goodbye to friends you’d spent time with every day.
And for many of us, Michelle Tanner had been someone we connected with at a very young age and quite literally grew up alongside.
I remember crying real tears. Because I genuinely believed I would never see her again. Time went on, my broken heart healed, and I eventually filled my afternoons with Clarissa Explains It All and Boy Meets World.
But then they came back.
And this time, in movies. What really kicked it off was, It Takes Two. Throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, Mary-Kate and Ashley cranked out movie after movie, each one introducing us to a new city, a new adventure, a new version of who we thought we could become.
The plots were secondary. Just seeing them again and getting a glimpse into their style, their interests, their isms was the draw.
One movie made you think soccer was secretly your calling despite never having touched a ball. You’d walk up to your parents mid-credits demanding enrollment in next season (proof of my personal soccer moment below). Another convinced you Paris was the only travel destination worth considering. A third had you believing every giant steel warehouse door opened into some impossibly cool art gallery filled with fascinating people.
Even now.. walking around New York this weekend I caught myself looking at one of those massive industrial doors and imagining exactly that.
Inspired by a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie I watched twenty-five years ago.
That’s influence. Not marketing.. or even a celebrity.
Influence. The ability to shape how someone sees the world long after they’ve forgotten where the idea came from.
Then around 2008 they disappeared again. And came back with something none of us saw coming.
Instead of another movie, they gave us a glimpse into their minds.
They released a coffee table book called Influence.
At first glance it looked like exactly what you’d expect from two former child stars entering the fashion world. But it wasn’t a fashion book.
It was a collection of ideas. Interviews, photography, art, creativity, philanthropy. The people, places, and perspectives that had shaped how they viewed the world. Conversations and personal interviews with Karl Lagerfeld, Diane Von Furstenberg, John Galliano, Christian Louboutin. All as evidence of a worldview.
For me, it came during college. And it was one of the first real examples of depth I’d ever seen.
I never knew 20-somethings could be inspired by 60-somethings. That the line of life could cut that close. I never knew art and fashion and music and philanthropy could all live in the same room, that you didn’t have to choose a lane.
MK&A, through one coffee table book, inadvertently gave our generation permission to go deeper. To think bigger. To dream further than we had before.
And they could do this because their lives were bigger than ours. They had a bigger reach. A bigger network. And that network grew their taste, their inspiration, their entire sense of what was possible.
They were, quite literally, influenced. And instead of keeping that to themselves.. in a world where social media was barely new and access to this kind of world was incredibly limited.. they shared it with us.
They were the original influencers of our generation. Before the word existed. They just shared what inspired them. And that changed what we thought was possible.
And this is the moment where I think their reinvention becomes undeniable.
Because by 2008, the world had already decided who “Mary-Kate and Ashley” were. Former child stars. Party girls. Fashion girls. One more tomboy, the other more girlie. There was a story already written for them.
But they ignored it entirely.
Fast forward to 2016 when my husband and I first started dating, he came over and saw the book sitting in my apartment.
He made an offhand comment assuming it was probably surface-level. Which, at the time, was a fair assumption.
But my protective nature kicked in and I was determined to show him otherwise. When I opened it and started walking him through it, explaining why I loved it so much, he got curious.
I talked about how much I admired not just their style, but their taste. Their intellect. Their appreciation for art and design and interesting people. The way they seemed to pay attention to things the rest of us overlooked.
Before we knew it, hours had passed. We sat there flipping through every page, studying every image, reading every interview, and learning about the people who had influenced MK&A.
And in the process, we were being influenced by them too.
I’ve thought about that night a lot over the years because I think it perfectly illustrates the pattern.
Every time they’ve disappeared, they came back having done something.
Grown something.. decided something. And every time, what they brought back met us exactly where we were too.
Their Full House era was our Full House era. Home, family, siblings, learning boundaries.
Their movie era was our movie era. Friendships, independence, boys, figuring out what we looked like and who we wanted to be.
Their Influence era was ours too. We were old enough by then to care about ideas. About art. About the world behind the world. About what it actually means to have taste versus just having things.
And it kept going. The Row arrived right when many of us were ready to stop chasing trends and start choosing style with intention.
Their becoming has continued to mirror our becoming.
And if you’ve ever felt genuinely proud of their growth. If you’ve related to every era along the way.. that’s yours too. That’s your own evolution, your own becoming, reflected back at you from someone else’s spotlight.
Reinvention doesn’t always feel like something you’re doing or somewhere you’re going. Sometimes it just feels like the next thing you’re drawn to. The next version of what matters. You only see it clearly when you look back.
Or when someone holds up a mirror. Or in this case when you can relate to someone else’s reinventions in real time.
They turned 40 this weekend. And everyone has a lot to say about 40. That it’s when you finally stop apologizing. That it’s when you get clear. That it’s your decade. The one where the reinvention gets intentional and the noise gets quiet.
But Mary-Kate and Ashley have already done this repeatedly and before forty.
Which makes me think 40 for them isn’t a beginning.. it’s just another layer.
And if the pattern holds.. whatever they build next will arrive exactly when we can relate to it.
Meg is the Co-Founder & CEO of BONDE, a private professional club for accomplished women. If you’re interested, apply here.
