Are these the same celebrities who denounced anyone who resisted the mask, the vaccine, and the lockdown in Covid times?

I'm reading "Pop Culture Takes Up Smoking Again/From movies and TV shows to music, the habit is no longer taboo. It’s even being celebrated for the way it makes characters look cool or powerful" (NYT).

Both Lorde and [Addison] Rae have worked with the singer whom [Jared Oviatt, the man behind the Instagram account @Cigfluencers,] credits with the smoking revival: Charli XCX, the Brat Summer pioneer who is a proud smoker. She even once received a bouquet of cigs for her birthday from Rosalía, another notable smoker. (The bouquet evoked the bowls of cigarettes Mary-Kate Olsen reportedly set out at her 2015 wedding to Olivier Sarkozy, a subversive, very French detail.)

What is Ashley Olsen doing, walking in the forest with a beer and a machete?

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"Modest fashion might come across as a humblebrag: You have to be a pretty stylish, pretty good-looking woman to claim ownership of such radical dowdiness...."

"It can also sometimes seem like an elitist project of sociocultural self-positioning: By embracing the covered-up look, you declare yourself part of a particular psychographic tribe, one whose members don’t just dress for other women, but for a particular subset of other women — those who get it, who are sophisticated enough to understand that opting out of conventional beauty standards makes for its own kind of conceptual, better-than-thou fashion. It also, however, has the feel of a real dare. Observing this version of feminist signaling, which conflates the rebel, haphazard spirit of a Bloomsbury Group-like smockishness with traces of early ’90s grunge and a dash of post-bellum Sunday best, we might begin to ask ourselves: What happens when women start dressing in ways that are less than conventionally flattering? Why are they doing it? And what does it look like when fashion choices that might have been linked to female oppression perform in the service of liberation?"

From "Modest Dressing, as a Virtue/What’s really behind fashion’s — and women’s — love of concealing clothes?" by Naomi Fry. The NYT published that article on November 2nd, but I only noticed it yesterday, when it was featured on the front page. I'm thinking that it has — in the last week and a half — become more timely, because of the sexual harassment/assault stories in the news. The author tries to answer her question by talking to some women to find out why they are clothing themselves in a manner that doesn't flaunt their body parts. Specifically "nonreligious women" are asked — because they are "trendier" and more likely to be deciding for themselves what they want to wear.

“I really disagree with women who think walking around naked is liberation. I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, too many people get to enjoy this for it to be liberation,’ ” [said Aminatou Sow, a 32-year-old digital strategist and podcaster], only half in jest. Instead, she cites figures like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who, first as actresses and street-style sensations and later as designers of the Row, made dressing in long, hobo-ish layers chic. “It was really jarring, and men didn’t like it,” Sow recalled to me. “But there was something disgusting and liberating about it. These were girls who didn’t care how anyone else was supposed to be dressing. It was the rejection of body politics.”

The last paragraph of the article begins with one hell of a sentence: "Navigating the world in a woman’s body remains a fraught proposition in the most quotidian and granular of ways."

Are you in there — in your body — navigating it? Are you not at one with your body? If not, why not? And, more importantly, what kinds of clothes and hats and shoes could reunify you with yourself?

Navigating the world in a woman’s body remains a fraught proposition.... The oldest meaning of the English word "fraught" is "Of a vessel: Laden" as in "The drowmound was so hevy fraught That unethe myght it saylen aught" (a1400 Coer de L. 2459)(OED).

At the wedding reception: "bowls and bowls filled with cigarettes, and everyone smoked the whole night."

The ever-childlike Mary-Kate Olsen, 29, married the 46-year-old French banker Olivier Sarkozy (the half-brother of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy). 

ADDED: Maybe it was a tribute to France... to France and survival... survival, French style.

"Like two tragic Playboy bunnies who're going through some kind of tiresome art school phase where they lounge around the mansion reading Anais Nin...

"... and smoking cloves and talking about how their work as centerfolds is really just a post-modern reclamation of the male gaze and telling Hef not to be such a phallocentrist perv. But now that I'm old, I feel like, a) screw The Girls Next Door, THAT's the reality show I want to watch, and b) eh, the rabbit ears are kind of cute...."

"There's something about the Olsens that makes them seem like trinkets...."

Robin Givhan on the Olsen twins:

Ashley Olsen... appeared on "Good Morning America" and spoke with Diane Sawyer. The morning host insisted that they stand next to each other so the audience could take note of just how teeny-tiny the millionaire author is compared with the statuesque journalist. We couldn't help but wonder: Would Sawyer have been so inclined to treat the equally diminutive actress Jada Pinkett Smith or former labor secretary Robert Reich like a Travelocity gnome?... Assembling [their new] book took more than a year and was daunting, one of them said. It might have been Mary-Kate. But it could just as easily could have been Ashley. It was impossible to tell them apart.... As individuals, they do not seem fully realized. As adults, they are a blur. When we see Ashley solo in the middle of a cocktail party, we wonder: Where is her other half? What is she doing? And who left this child alone in a room crowded with adults?

Soooo.... wow... twins are freaky.... I mean, I thought Givhan was critical of Diane Sawyer, but then, she just went on infantalizing and dehumanizing them. Hey, big news: Twins are human. Short people are human.

Entrepreneurship is really cute.

Ginia Bellfante writes about the Olsen twins, who may seem like tiny, empty celebrities who don't work, but actually have an impressive fashion business and sound pretty smart (especially Ashley):

Mary-Kate’s contribution to the enterprise is a collector’s knowledge. She has been buying vintage Lanvin and Givenchy, among other classic labels of the mid-20th century, for a number of years... Ashley is the more entrepreneurial, the one who will tell you how much she admires Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

“I’m focused on building a true American brand,” she said, explaining why it was important to her that the line be manufactured in New York. “For me it was the control. I needed to make sure I could see the product being made. Things like this are successful when you really care, when you are paying attention to every single detail.”

The Olsens are known for keeping a tight grip on their image, but their general reluctance to talk to the press has left them ceding ground to tabloids eager to construct the narrative.... The magazines... became fixated on how the twins dressed, running picture after picture of the two in big, round glasses and loose, layered knits, implying something deranged and effortful in a look that suggested Janis Joplin.

“I was from L.A., and layering made sense to me,” Mary-Kate explained. “I was cold. I put on whatever was on the floor when I woke up.” The look seemed constructed to make her disappear, but it rendered an entirely different effect....

The Olsens seem to regard themselves above all as artist-moguls, and the challenges they describe are the challenges of businesspeople. They have to figure out how to deal with expanding the Row while still letting it feel like a quiet discovery for whoever is buying it. As Ashley sees it, her career is brand building, in fashion and beyond. “It is what I love. There are so many voids in the market, and I want to find those opportunities and make the most of them.”

Nice. I love them now. Here's their website. And here's their new book, "Influence," which has them talking not about themselves, but interviewing artists and designers they like.

"Ashcan chic ... a kind of homeless masquerade."

The Olsen twins have created a cool new style for young girls, which, with luck will drive out the too-tight, too-bare, too conspicuously expensive things girls have worn in recent years.

As fall turned to winter and edged toward spring, [Mary Kate] Olsen, 18, pushed her version of ashcan chic to emphatic extremes ... 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.

I approve! They're adorable. And those other clothes were not good for young people. These things are infinitely more charming and fun.