Someone else made you a mix!
Grab your Starbucks cups and huge sunglasses
On the podcast, Las Culturistas, hosts Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers ask their guests the essential question, “what was the culture that made you say, ‘culture is for me?’”
Though I will never be a guest on the pod, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my answer to this question. What is the piece of pop culture that turned me into the obsessive I am today? I go back and forth, but inevitably circle back to the same thing: Mary-Kate and Ashely Olsen.
The Olsen Twins were the first celebrities I really cared about and spent [my parents’] money on. I’ve seen the movies and shows, read the novelizations, listened to the cassettes, owned the dolls, perused the website, and even subscribed to the magazine (which is iconic because they put out 2 issues before shutting down and my mom had to call to figure out what happened to my subscription). I hung pictures of them on my bulletin board and wanted desperately to emulate their clothes and hair. They were SO COOL.
Once they turned 18 and fulfilled whatever contractual obligations they had to their production company, they more or less retreated from acting and the public eye. This only made them cooler. Today, the Olsens are the creatives behind The Row, an incredibly chic, high-end fashion line, and they are rarely spotted beyond smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee outside their office, at a fancy horse show, or in the pictures from a friend’s wedding. I live for these sightings, documented with love on one of my favorite Instagram accounts, Olsen Oracle.
It is thanks to Olsen Oracle that I learned about the monthly playlists that The Row puts on Spotify. If I want to pretend I am a multi-millionaire fashion designer and not an underpaid museum professional, I throw one of these playlists on while I’m at work. Hit play and close your eyes and you too could be making chain smoking look cool as hell on the streets of New York!
I rarely know a single song on these playlists, but that’s the fun of it. And the proof that MK & A will always be cooler than me.
Thanks for reading- please share with a friend if you enjoyed! What’s your favorite Olsen Twins Movie? Know any other cool mixes I should be following? Let me know!