Last fall, soon after Mary-Kate Olsen enrolled as one of only
two self-made multimillionaires in the freshman class of New
York University, she was seen dashing around Greenwich Village
wearing floppy hats, huge sunglasses, dust-catcher skirts and
street-sweeping cable-knit cardigans.
As fall turned to winter and edged toward spring, Olsen, 18,
pushed her version of ashcan chic to emphatic extremes, an
evolution charted by glossy magazines that snoop on stars in
everyday activities.
The look became dottier and dottier, until it morphed into a
kind of homeless masquerade, one that was accented by subtle
luxuries such as a cashmere muffler, a Balenciaga lariat bag
and, of course, her signature carryout latte from Starbucks.
Olsen is a fashion anomaly, and so is her equally funky twin,
Ashley (the other self-made millionaire NYU freshman). Their
style would seem to mark them as front-runners for Earl
Blackwell's worst-dressed list. In fact, the twins are
trendsetters for the latest hipster look. They are influencing
the same generation of girls and young women who fell for them
as wholesome child stars, buying their Mattel dolls, and who
later, as tweens, spent $750 million a year on denims and pastel
tops from the mary- kateandashley line at Wal-Mart.
"The Olsens are the real thing," fashion role models for a
generation entering adulthood, said Karen Berenson, a stylist
who works in New York and Los Angeles. She is unfazed by
Mary-Kate Olsen's widely publicized admission to a clinic last
year for an eating disorder. "She makes skinny girls in baggy
clothes look cool," Berenson said.
Teenagers and young women have long taken style cues from
celebrities, of course. But the sway of the Olsens is especially
surprising because it is a radical swing from influences of
recent years, such as the flamboyantly sexy, skin-baring style
of Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson, as well as the
heiress look popularized by Paris Hilton.
Just months ago, "stylish young women used to wear Gucci or
Prada head to toe," Berenson said. Today they are more apt to be
seen at supermarkets or parties toting a beat-up Chloe bag,
their eyes shaded by enormous, high-priced Laura Biaggiotti
sunglasses, the faint suggestion of opulence hidden beneath
chadorlike layers of cashmere and ankle-length peasant skirts.
David Wolfe, the creative director of the Doneger Group, which
forecasts fashion trends, was in Las Vegas last month at a
fashion trade show. "The trendiest, coolest people were wearing
things like a chiffon skirt with fur boots," he said. "It looked
like they had gotten dressed in the dark."
The new look has acquired a name: Bobo style. "You know,
bohemian bourgeois," explained Kathryn Neal, 28, a freelance
writer in New York, who is partial to billowing Alexander
McQueen pirate shirts worn with beat-up jeans.
"Bobo" is borrowed from the title of a 5-year-old work of pop
sociology, Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks, now an Op-Ed
columnist for The New York Times. He used the term to describe a
breed of well-heeled consumers who bashed materialism while
embracing all manner of luxury.
Lauren Stover, the author of Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide
to Living on the Edge (Bulfinch Press, 2004), has noticed the
trend, where young women wear Grandma's crocheted shawl,
moth-eaten cashmere sweaters and scuffed cowboy boots.
"It's perfectly fine to look like a bag lady," Stover said.
The look flies in the face of the elegance that dominated
fashion runways as little as a year ago. More important, it
seems to address the discomfort of a younger generation with
overt displays of wealth.
For the Olsens, who together are estimated by Fortune magazine
to be worth $275 million, it may be a way of blending in with
other college students, even though the twins, who first starred
on television at 9 months old, and whose latest movie, New York
Minute, was released last year, are planning to move into a
luxury condo at Morton Square.
In addition to classroom studies, Ashley Olsen is interning with
the designer Zac Posen, and her sister is an intern with Annie
Leibovitz, the photographer. They declined to be interviewed for
this article.
"As a society we have gone too far in the direction of
ostentation," said Wolfe of the Doneger Group. Mixing one or two
expensive pieces in a wardrobe otherwise straight out of Les
Miserables is an indication, he added, that "we want to begin
withdrawing from luxury, but we are still addicted to it,
searching for a way to hang on while we try to kick the habit."
Berenson was more blunt: "These days you just feel stupid and
shallow walking around with a $1,000 bag."
Such attitudes date at least to the 1960s, when a generation of
young people, embarrassed by their parents' materialism, cast
off their bourgeois trappings in favor of peasant shirts and
worker smocks.
Even before Mary-Kate Olsen's sojourn into Dumpster dressing,
Bobo style began encroaching on the popular consciousness by way
of Hollywood trendsetters such as Kirsten Dunst and Sienna
Miller, the French actress Lou Doillon and Chloe Sevigny, who
once accessorized a designer evening dress with a plastic
shopping bag.
Some stars jettisoned their logo bags in favor of more discreet
status signifiers: fur-lined coats and hoodies, felt fedoras,
hobo bags, cashmere thermal sweaters by Marc Jacobs and Chanel
tweeds roughed up with frayed edges and unfinished hems.
Today variations on that unfinished look are widely perceived as
proclaiming, if not one's political convictions, then at least a
degree of social mobility.
Leslie Savan, the author of The Sponsored Life (Temple
University Press, 1994), about advertising and American culture,
calls the Olsen-influenced Bobo style "forcefully
unostentatious, dressing like an unmade bed." It works for some
people as a kind of aesthetic corrective. "If you can't reform
your social attitudes, you can at least reform your look," Savan
said. For devotees, mixing the inexpensive and the expensive,
the old and the new "seems to make you more interesting,
mysterious, textured," she said.
"But of course," she noted, "you are buying those qualities." |
