No Place Like The Row

You may have come across a nondescript leather sandal with a $690 price tag or, perhaps, a woman named Zoë or Kendall or Jennifer, captured by paparazzi in an absolutely perfect chunky knit. Maybe you saw the TikToks of a line snaking outside a New York City sample sale last fall, where expectant faces melted down over 75-percent-off merchandise that still rang up for triple (or quadruple) digits.

No matter your introduction to the brand, you’ve likely heard of The Row. Over the past two decades, its understated expression of luxury—logoless leather bags, tapered ballet flats, roomy wool coats—has divided fashion into two groups: those who get it and those who don’t. The former includes every major luxury retailer, every A-lister worth following, and the CFDA, which has awarded it seven times in the last 14 years (a sign that the label is taken seriously by the industry’s power players). Most consequentially, you can trace any major trend that has reached mass appeal in recent years, from quiet luxury to jelly sandals, back to The Row. By 2024, the owners of Chanel and L’Oréal had taken on minority ownership, sending the brand’s valuation to approximately $1 billion.

All those bona fides aside, those who don’t get it are justifiably confused. The Row began with two founders who wanted to make the best possible version of a white T-shirt. Those founders, however, were Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen—beloved former child stars then enrolled at New York University—and their tee wasn’t meant for world closet domination. They had their sights set on a client who was as discerning about her fabrics and her client-relations representatives as they were, even at just 18 years old. The brand would stand for quality with a capital Q, releasing a product only when it felt perfect, in a highly limited run. They would price it accordingly: If perfection could be bought, it couldn’t be cheap.

It’s an ethos that has lasted; the company turns 20 this year. For the milestone anniversary, Marie Claire spoke with more than two dozen people with close ties to the brand, from former employees and early retail advocates to long-term clients and the first reporters who ever reviewed its collections (the Olsens, through a publicist, declined to participate in the story, as did the brand itself) to tackle a question entire Reddit threads have yet to satisfactorily answer: How, of all brands, did The Row get so big?

A New Teenage Dream

2005

Prior to starting The Row, the Olsens’ design experience had been limited to a tween collection for Walmart. By 2005, they were ready to start something different: an upscale fashion venture where they would be the designers but not the faces. They officially launched their first collection for The Row (named for London’s famed Savile Row) in 2006. The following year, they attempted to enter the mid-range market with contemporary women’s clothing brand, Elizabeth and James (which exists today as a diffusion line sold only at Kohl’s).

Amanda Mull, journalist for Bloomberg Businessweek: 2006 was a deeply unserious time in American culture, quite frankly. The Olsens had been in the tabloids and in gossip blogs a lot, carrying It Bags of the time—they particularly liked Balenciaga—and it seemed to me their interest in serious fashion was real, but it’s very hard to start a new luxury line. It’s even harder when you have the whole history of celebrity coming along with you.

Julie Gilhart, former Barneys New York executive: We already had a relationship with Mary-Kate and Ashley. I got to know them through the New York store. They were great customers. They were buying the iconic pieces of Nicolas Ghesquière and all the really cool fashion brands. When they decided to do their own collection, it was because they couldn’t find great pieces that support your wardrobe, that you wear over and over again and mix in with the special things you have. They came to the table with a really well honed taste level.

Robin Givhan, author, Pulitzer Prize winning fashion critic, and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times: That was a period after a lot of really ill-fated celebrity brands. The Row seemed to have been forging a different path as far as what could be produced from designers of this background.

Gilhart: I didn’t have a big belief in celebrity brands because we were so designer focused. We were looking for real talent, and then along come celebrities who put their names on brands. As a courtesy to Mary-Kate and Ashley, because they were great girls and great customers, we took a look. I was fully prepared to say, "Nice but not necessary." I walked into the showroom, and [the line] was subtle, like they are. The quality was beautiful, and the pieces were exactly what they said they wanted to do. It wasn’t trend driven at all.

Neelam Ahooja, content creator: They started with the perfect tees. Oddly enough, I didn’t love them. They were nice, but they weren’t my favorite. I liked the knits right away. It very much felt like Theory or Tahari—but an upscale version. That didn’t really exist back then.

Rickie De Sole, VP, Nordstrom fashion director, and former Vogue editor: I remember the early days, going to those presentations. There was this sense of "come into our home" quiet. It was always about the perfect item—the perfect sweater, that great coat—and that sense of intimacy, walking into their spaces and clocking the art on the wall or the chair that was perfectly placed in the corner. It’s the clothes, but it’s also the world that surrounds it. That’s been true since day one.

Dirk Standen, dean of the school of fashion at SCAD and former fashion editor: I was at Style.com at the time. Pretty soon after launch, we ran a video they had made, set in a house in the Hollywood Hills. It was very grainy footage, sort of Super 8 style. The clothing was pretty simple—a white blazer and a white T-shirt with a deep V and a black pencil skirt—but I remember it had a real sensibility to it. Dare I say, it was a vibe.

Gilhart: It was like the most quiet launch in the history of fashion. We wrote a small order, and it was sold to customers who had no idea it was Mary-Kate and Ashley. They just thought, Oh, this is a nice sweater. It grew from there.

Givhan: What was really interesting to me was the fact that the clothes were aimed at, and enthusiastically supported by, women who were, like, 10 years older than they were at the time. The people who were wearing the clothes were well into their 30s and 40s. It was so unusual because, typically, designers of that age are designing for their contemporaries. Even as they get older, they start looking backward and designing for people who are younger. I was struck that not only were Mary-Kate and Ashley not doing that, but they were very consciously designing for women who were already older than they were, as if they were really celebrating and anticipating the idea of maturity and adulthood and coming into your own.

Growth Mode

2010

The Row’s team stayed focused on basics for the first few years. But rising talents in the industry sensed that something big was happening at the brand’s Greenwich Street offices and sought to leave their mark by joining the company. Soon, its studio became a training ground for emerging designers and an assembly line for It Products.

Ruthie Friedlander, former digital director for The Row: I was working at Chanel, which was, for all intents and purposes, the dream job. Then my boss made an announcement that she was leaving to go work at this brand called The Row, and I rallied to come with her because I wanted to be wherever she was. Plus the idea of being at a luxury brand that was at those beginning stages was really exciting to me.

Sijeo Kim, former designer for The Row and design director for Guest in Residence: I joined The Row as a knitwear designer. Before that, I’d spent three years at Helmut Lang, during which the company went through several internal shifts that made the design direction feel somewhat unclear. I wanted to work for a brand with a stronger, more defined identity, with a clear point of view. The Row offered exactly that.

Standen: The brand had been building in a very thoughtful way for five years, but I think it was really around 2011, 2012 that people realized it was a force to be reckoned with. The more-than-$30,000 alligator bag came out, and then [The Row] won its first CFDA Award.

Mull: What accessories generally do for a luxury brand is give it a wider audience. A lot more people can justify spending that much money on something that they can carry every day. I remember thinking that The Row’s proposition for handbags seemed a little bit ridiculous. When the brand was launching bags, $5,000 was more than what a lot of Chanel bags cost. It was a real statement: We’re sticking to our guns on pricing and what it is that we believe we offer the consumer. If you want it, you’re going to have to pay.

Kim: A major turning point for me was the development of the Sibel sweater. What made it special was that it was fully knitted on a whole-garment machine using a cashmere-wool blend, which was more accessible than the 100-percent-cashmere yarns The Row was primarily focused on at that time. That balance of luxury and approachability resonated strongly with clients who longed for something beautifully made and unmistakably The Row.

De Sole: The clothes have been there since day one, but getting into shoes was really a moment of growth and change. It suddenly became more accessible. Obviously, that’s all relative—I say that with some level of awareness around the price of The Row shoes—but it was a way of buying into the brand. If you couldn’t afford the beautiful trench coat or the cashmere sweater, shoes offered the ability to dabble in The Row. Now shoes are such a part of its DNA.

Givhan: I do remember the season that I went to look at the collection and they showed me the Margaux bag. I thought it was a really beautiful bag—a bit heavy. I feel like I was proven correct, because later iterations were lined in canvas as opposed to leather, which lightened it significantly.

Standen: People used to try to dismiss them as celebrity designers, and that clearly didn’t stick. I do think people, both the consumer who can afford it and the more aspirational consumer, see that The Row is worth it. The quality is there. It’s going to last more than one season. That’s really the core of the appeal. The brand’s had a string of really good designers who have gone on to greater heights. They have a really exacting vision of what they want, and they have the grit to really stick to it. You see the consistency in everything they do. That’s probably a really strong training ground for people to come out with that sense of I want it to be exact, and I’m not gonna be happy until it is. When you create something with that level of integrity, it carries over to the consumer.

Caitlin Burke, stylist: When people want to wear it, it’s because they know inherently it’s signaling that you have a more refined taste. You’re not like a Real Housewife who’s wearing all logos and Louis Vuitton. They want to establish that they’re more edited in their point of view.

Evolving the Experience

2014

By the late 2010s, The Row was ready for rooms of its own. Its first stores opened in L.A (2014) and in New York City (2016), introducing a retail experience that felt more like visiting a friend’s home than going into a boutique.

De Sole: I remember when the Los Angeles store opened; it took the insider experience that we would have at the shows or their showroom, and suddenly you’ve got that as a customer. You were able to walk in and see that midcentury modern space on Melrose and the pool and the beautiful chairs. The customer was able to experience that world of The Row.

Gilhart: The way the brand showed at New York Fashion Week was so luxurious, so sophisticated, and so very über New York; that very chic, just-so-tasteful type of expression of the really rich. There wasn’t a lot of glitz. There wasn’t a lot of lights, cameras, action! It was just pure quality.

De Sole: I remember sitting with André Leon Talley at a show on the Upper East Side. It had a townhouse venue. It wasn’t as formulaic as some of the shows back in the day. It just felt so different from that and so personal, and that really created this sort of cult around it. It was a special experience to go to a Row presentation or show, and it remains that way to this day.

Givhan: The presentations were always quite small. I recall going to one in a little restaurant, and we were sitting in little banquettes. When the brand went to Paris, shows were always quite intimate. They were never keen on splashiness.

Friedlander: I walked into the job with the approach that if you don’t figure out what you want to do digitally, you could be at risk of other people telling your story. So how do we create your version without being everywhere? This was still the time when it was thought of as crazy to see bloggers at fashion shows. For me, both The Row and its founders are deeply, deeply visual. Instagram seemed like a natural platform to be on. That said, most brands that were doing Instagram were very founder-first and celebrity focused, which is not what they’re like. My challenge was, how do I pitch a strategy that’s going to feel on-brand and not immediately get rejected because the platform is prioritizing the antithesis of what this brand is trying to be? It’s impressive to me that they’ve basically kept the same strategy, to date, that we launched with.

The Popularity Paradox

2019

A turbulent time for retail—including the bankruptcy of Barneys, one of its biggest wholesale supporters, and the Covid-19 pandemic—led to layoffs and a downsizing. But by 2021, The Row’s products were on the radar of celebrities, creators, and consumers. As the spotlight got brighter, though, the brand got quieter: Phones were banned from runway shows, and the already press-shy founders absconded from any public-facing time. It also began attracting criticism from longtime fans.

Burke: Every woman who has taste, if they can financially afford it, has at least something from The Row. It used to be more of an "if you know, you know" brand, but with the boom of quiet luxury, it was the brand most people were talking about.

Ahooja: Around 2020, content creators around the world were starting to wear The Row. They weren’t wearing it head to toe, but they would be incorporating the ’90s bag, the fisherman sandals; we were quietly advertising for them. Then Kendall Jenner stepped out in a head-to-toe look, and I think there was a collective sigh from the loyalists because it put the brand on the page in a more obvious, commercialized way that was sort of the antithesis of what The Row was supposed to be. But if you want to grow, I guess that’s how you do it.

Mull: The Row has been very canny in how it structures its collections and its offerings to make really wearable clothes for people. A lot of brands have abandoned the pursuit of making wearable clothes. But The Row’s getting to the size where it’s a little bit difficult for it to maintain the type of control over its public image that it clearly wants to have.

De Sole: Mary-Kate and Ashley have always been a little elusive. They used to be more present. I remember them coming out at the end when they did the presentations. They’d mingle afterward, and you could ask questions.

Givhan: I went with them to one of their factories, and even though this was for a story, they didn’t want to name where they were producing. At one point, the owner was showing them a sample, and they very quickly whisked it away because they didn’t want it to be photographed. They were always private in that way, always keeping things close to the vest. It’s certainly gotten more extreme. Some of it harkens back to another time, when design houses were not keen on having their entire collection posted online because they worried about people copying it. A lot of those details, their desire for privacy, their desire to maintain control over imagery—all of those things that feel pretentious, to some degree, feel, to me, like they’re trying to keep things at a more human scale.

Mull: I don’t think that The Row is any weirder or pickier about its customers than any other brand. How it has gone about telegraphing its exclusivity—the refusal to deal with the internet, the refusal to make a lot of logo products—is a little more of a commitment to the bit.

Ahooja: I have been close to the company for a long time. It took an interest in my work and pulled me in. I got to see a little too much. You almost don’t want to know, because now I’m having to, in my mind, delineate between craft and company. I value and love the craft. I don’t value the company.

What Comes Next

2026

No one can deny how The Row jump-started a movement toward more minimal design. But what does that mean for its future, especially as consumers move past quiet luxury in favor of more expressive, individualistic fashion?

Tariro Makoni, writer and strategist: The Row is far more powerful than I think it even wants you to think that it is. It has gotten to a point where it doesn’t need to be the loudest, nor does it have to have the SKU that people know is selling out. It just needs to be.

Givhan: The Row contradicted what so many of the early celebrity brands thought, which is that people will come because you’re a celebrity and you will get attention because you’re a celebrity and therefore that’s a good thing. In fact, it’s almost the exact opposite: Yes, people will come because you will be perceived as this curiosity, but you have a much bigger hill to climb. The brand has been giving people a template for how you go about it.

Gilhart: It has a core customer, and she understands the price of things; she’s okay with that, she really likes the style. That’s who it’s catering to. The rest is just noise. It’s a slippery slope because people are more educated about costs, so you have to be sure that you’re pricing items so customers don’t feel like they’re overpaying. The Row’s been able to do that. And because it’s so focused and what it does is quite beautiful, it’s not noisy. It’s like a secret room, and it’s not inviting everybody in. It’s just doing what it does, and that’s the attraction. This is not a strategy—this is how these people are. That authenticity counts for a lot.

Kim: Honestly, my perception hasn’t changed much since leaving, but my relationship to the brand has. When I was there, I focused on doing the work: building knitwear, refining silhouettes, problem-solving in the details. Now I can look at The Row without the weight of deadlines or fittings. I can see the consistency and the quiet luxury from a consumer’s perspective, and I understand why people connect to it so deeply.

Gilhart: In a day when sales are not so great across the board, The Row is still selling.

Mull: The Row serves as a reminder that women want clothes they can actually wear. There’s a real audience for very expensive, very wearable clothing. Fashion brands tend to get so wrapped up in stunts—how many fashion shows and events all over the world a year can we do? The Row, among a few others, has served as a counterpoint. You don’t have to do that. Have a point of view and make clothes that are interesting and made from wonderful materials, the kind of things that somebody with a high budget can get a bunch of actual wear out of.

Standen: Every time, it has proved its critics wrong. It would be sort of foolish to bet against the brand at this point.

Friedlander: The Row was probably the shortest job that I had, from a time-span perspective, and it’s the job I took the most away from. I own my own business now. Next to my desk, I have a note that says, "What would The Row do?"

This story appears in the March Craftsmanship issue of Marie Claire.