Ashley Olsen

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen received the 2025 CFDA American Accessory Designer of the Year award for The Row. The recognition followed earlier accessories wins and arrived after the Margaux bag had become one of the house’s most visible and commercially important designs. It confirmed that the brand’s low-logo bags and footwear had developed an identity as durable as its ready-to-wear, built through proportion, leather and handling instead of emblematic hardware.

In September 2024, Mousse Partners and Tethys Invest acquired minority stakes in The Row, with Imaginary Ventures and Saint Dominique Capital also reported among the investors. The transaction valued the company at about one billion dollars while Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen retained majority control. The deal gave an independent American house long-term capital from families and investors closely connected to European luxury without placing it inside a conventional conglomerate structure.

The Row opened its first permanent Paris store at 1 Rue du Mont Thabor in 2024. The former restaurant retained limestone walls and was furnished with French modernist and post-war design, extending the residential gallery model into the city where the house presents many of its collections. The opening completed a core retail circuit across New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris while maintaining a small number of highly controlled locations.

The Row shifted parts of its presentation rhythm towards January and June, loosening its dependence on the standard New York and Paris womenswear calendar. The change suited a house already accustomed to private appointments, delayed imagery and product cycles organised around its own clients. It did not end seasonal collections, but it made timing another area in which the founders could control how the work entered the market and the press.

The Row opened its London flagship at 15 Carlos Place in 2019. Selldorf Architects restored a former banking hall by revealing historic columns, windows and room proportions, then organised clothing and accessories alongside changing art and vintage furniture. The store translated the domestic language of Los Angeles and New York into a more formal Mayfair setting without reducing the project to a repeated global template.

The Margaux bag emerged in 2018 as a softly structured top-handle form with almost no visible branding. Its balance of generous volume, supple leather and practical interior design made it a defining accessories product for The Row and a major driver of the house’s recognition beyond ready-to-wear. Subsequent sizes and East-West variations expanded the family while keeping the original bag’s deliberately unassertive identity.

After testing men’s pieces through small in-store assortments, The Row launched a permanent menswear collection in October 2018. The wardrobe centred on suits, coats, knitwear, shirts, denim, footwear and accessories developed through two years of wear-testing and specialist production in Japan, France, Italy and the United States. The project transferred the founders’ womenswear principles—foundation pieces, rich cloth and discreet construction—into a full male wardrobe without turning menswear into a separate brand.

The New York flagship opened in 2016 inside a three-storey townhouse at 17 East 71st Street. Jacques Grange developed an interior where limestone, art, vintage furniture and restrained rails made the store behave like a private residence. The project gave The Row a permanent hometown setting and clarified that the house’s idea of luxury depended as much on pace, hospitality and spatial composition as on the garments themselves.

The Row entered the Paris presentation calendar in September 2015 with a private event at the Château de Courances outside the city. Models moved through the estate and gardens before an intimate dinner, while the house controlled photography and released its own images later. The move established Paris as an international platform for the brand without adopting the scale or media access of a conventional runway show.

The Row opened its first flagship on Melrose Place in Los Angeles in 2014. Developed with Montalba Architects and Courtney Applebaum, the renovated residence used a central pool, indoor-outdoor rooms, modernist furniture and art to remove the usual boundary between boutique and home. The project established retail architecture as a core expression of the house: quiet, tactile and specific to place, with clothing shown as one element within a complete interior.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America named Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen Womenswear Designers of the Year in 2012. The award gave institutional recognition to a house that had spent its early years resisting the assumptions attached to celebrity-founded fashion. It also confirmed that The Row’s fabric, cut and product discipline had become legible within American fashion as a sustained design practice, not a temporary crossover project.

By 2008, The Row had expanded its initial capsule into a complete womenswear collection. Tailoring, coats, knitwear, dresses and trousers allowed the founders to test their low-logo material discipline across a broader wardrobe, while the label’s refusal of overt celebrity marketing remained intact. The expansion established womenswear as the creative and commercial centre from which later bags, footwear and menswear would develop.

Ashley Olsen co-founded The Row in 2005 after initiating the white T-shirt project that became its technical foundation. Her role links design development to the company’s measured expansion: new categories are researched through fitting, manufacture and client response before becoming permanent. Across womenswear, menswear, accessories and retail, she has maintained a consistent standard of fabric, construction and spatial control while leading the house with Mary-Kate Olsen.

Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen began The Row with a focused study of the white T-shirt. Repeated fittings across different bodies tested drape, length and stability, while a centre-back French seam helped prevent the jersey from twisting or losing shape. The study became the basis of the seven-piece collection launched commercially in 2006, which Barneys New York bought in full. It established the house’s lasting method: begin with an ordinary wardrobe form, then refine fabric and construction until its apparent simplicity becomes technically exact.