New York Times: "Hey There Groovy Olsen Chicks. Your Both Hip in Far-Out Ways"

When the New York Times says your hip, your hip. And they say the Olsens are hip!

Nytimes.com (reg. req.)

Mary-Kate, Fashion Star

The dumpster chic of the Olsen twins would seem to mark them as front-runners for a worst-dressed list. In fact the twins are trendsetters for the latest hipster look.

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, Ms. 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 like a cashmere muffler, a Balenciaga lariat bag and of course her signature carryout latte from Starbucks.

"Ms. Olsen is a fashion pauvre…"

Ms. Olsen is a fashion pauvre (pauper), and so is her equally funky twin, Ashley (the other self-made millionaire N.Y.U. 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…"

"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 last year to a clinic to treat an eating disorder and her continuing recovery. "She makes skinny girls in baggy clothes look cool," Ms. Berenson said.

"…the sway of the Olsens is especially surprising.."

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, like 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," Ms. Berenson said. Today they are more apt to be seen at supermarkets or parties toting a beat-up Chloé 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…."

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 five-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, which has cropped up in moneyed communities from Beverly Hills to the Upper West Side, 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," Ms. Stover said.

The look flies in the face of the conventions of 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.

"…estimated by Fortune magazine to be worth $275 million…"

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," Mr. Wolfe of the Doneger Group said. Mixing one or two expensive pieces in a wardrobe otherwise straight out of "Les Misérables" 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."

Ms. Berenson was more blunt: "These days you just feel stupid and shallow walking around with a $1,000 bag."

That might describe Marissa Dictenberg, 29, a knitwear designer in New York, who also strives for a blend of the luxurious and shabby: a mix of 1980's Malo cashmere sweaters, $40 vintage Joan & David riding boots, a $5 thrift-shop acrylic sweater, a high-price Loropiana cashmere scarf and a Henry Beguelin shearling cloat. The last, as Ms. Dictenberg knows, being the ultimate in high hippy chic. She describes her style as "unpredictable, hard to read, original" and, more important, as an antidote to the look of conspicuous consumption. "After all," Ms. Dictenberg said, "there is nothing creative or fabulous about flaunting your money by wearing a fur coat or big ring that everybody else has."

Such attitudes date back at least to the 1960's, when a generation of young people, embarrassed by their parents' materialism, cast off their bourgeois trappings in favor of peasant shirts, worker smocks and authentic djelabas. Even the very wealthy played the game: the heiress Talitha Getty famously made Moroccan caftans her exotic signature.

"….Mary-Kate Olsen's sojourn into Dumpster dressing…"

Even before Mary-Kate Olsen's sojourn into Dumpster dressing, Bobo style began encroaching on the popular consciousness by way of Hollywood trendsetters like Kirsten Dunst and Sienna Miller, the French actress Lou Doillon and Chloë 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. "On a social level Bobo is very New York City," said Ms. Neal, the freelance writer. "It's a way of showing that you have no boundaries, that whether you're at a party on Park Avenue or in an East Village bar, you can jump into anything, cross over into any kind of group and be accepted."

"…Olsen-influenced Bobo style…"

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," Ms. Savan said, adding that for devotees, mixing the inexpensive and the expensive, the old and the new "seems to make you more interesting, mysterious, textured."

"But of course," she noted, "you are buying those qualities."

In some quarters Bobo style is simply a way of dressing more discreetly. "People are tapped out on luxury," said Thakoon Panichgul, a young designer who incorporated bohemian frayed hems and disintegrating brocades in the collection for fall 2005 that he showed in New York last month. "We need to reinvent luxury in a more surprising way," he added, or at least treat it irreverently. He mentioned how Miuccia Prada once memorably wore her diamond necklace inside out to show off the backs of the stones. "That was subversive," Mr. Panichgul said, "It made you question the whole concept of luxury."

"This sweater is Bobo all right…"

Those words certainly resonate with Marina Albright, 22, a senior at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., who was trawling thought Barneys New York on a visit to Manhattan late last month. She turned up her nose at a selection of kaleidoscopic Pucci tops. "I wouldn't want one," Ms. Albright said. "They're almost like wearing a big double G.," she added, alluding to Gucci. Instead she gravitated toward a slouchy, poor-boy cardigan from Marni, pulling it over a tunic-length T-shirt and loose velour pants. "This sweater is Bobo all right," Ms. Albright murmured approvingly. "It works very hard at looking like it's not trying too hard."