It was a sultry afternoon in August, and Ms. Olsen and her sister Mary-Kate were visiting the production office of The Row, their two-year-old fashion label, on West 39th Street. The Olsens, despite being very rich women, have clearly chosen not to spend money on décor. The furniture is nicked, the windows mossy with grime, and the five employees who share the two-room office have to step around a stack of fabric bolts.

At least a tropical plant on one of the desks offered a bright spot of vitality.

“It’s fake,” Ashley said.

Her sister, the dreamier of the two, looked at the artificial greenery and said in a tone of rising lightness, “The table fell over the other day and the pot didn’t break and I was so mortified and impressed.”

This seems to be the classic response to the Olsen sisters as well. To read blogs devoted to them is to feel a queasiness with the fact of the Olsens — their physical smallness (“the magical millionaire pixies,” as one site refers to them) and, of course, their wayward style (“bad breath and dirty hair,” to quote another). Very few celebrities are either so fascinating or appalling that they manage to get under our skins, as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have, and it may be because they are twins. Yet their success in a field as competitive as fashion is impossible to deny. The Olsens, who are 23, have succeeded with two different labels simultaneously — The Row and the hip, less expensive Elizabeth and James — and without formal design training.

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