Has the Margaux Made Way for the Peggy?

These days, The Row has become a label that at once manages to singularly influence, yet supremely infuriate me, though through little fault of its own.

Let’s be honest: if it had a dollar for every time its name was uttered in relation to those hackneyed phrases (old money, quiet luxury, stealth wealth, what have you) over the last three years, it could probably afford its own trust fund. Which it probably does have multiples of already, in hindsight.

But what began as a useful shorthand for a highly specific style of understated dressing soon snowballed into one of fashion’s most blaring buzzwords – whispered, repeated, monetized, memed, screamed and finally, worn so thin even the people who embody it now seem reluctant to associate with it.

Which brings me to the people who do embody its ethos the most – the Olsen twins. The poster-children of fame, fantastic oversized coats, and nepo baby-dom, their influence on the realm of fashion, from the fit of their fitted tees to that exact splotch of red wine on Mary-Kate’s pistachio-green Balenciaga bag, remain legendary to date. Interestingly (although perhaps not so surprisingly), a coffee-table book they co-authored together in 2008 was titled Influence!

Now, here’s the part that infuriates me – The Row is the Olsen’s brainchild, an earnest attempt at creating a collection of seamless, timeless, trendless pieces that keep you afloat in an ever-churning vortex of it-pieces that cycle in and out of the zeitgeist faster than a Category 5 hurricane.

But somehow, our demented trend-cycle managed to learn all the wrong lessons from The Row, as evidenced in the case of the Margaux. And now I fear the same might be happening for the Peggy.

The Row-ification of Fashion

Now, there’s no denying that Mary‑Kate and Ashley Olsen have truly mastered the art of cultural ventriloquism: saying nothing, yet conveying everything, and in the process, somehow convincing our collective cultural psyche that we’ve arrived at the same conclusion independently. It’s precisely this sleight of hand that makes their influence so maddeningly effective.

And at a time when luxury brands tried to be louder than – and thus, dictate – the course of the culture around them, The Row, in its quest to develop the perfect white tee, showed the industry what it’s like to be to take the quieter route – and still be the loudest in the room. And now, there’s a whole slew of brands (Phoebe Philo’s Old Céline included!) that has undergone a steady, gradual recalibration of fashion toward restraint and refinement. And this, dear reader, is what I call fashion’s Row-ification makeover.

Yet, it’s not as if understatement is a new invention and not fashion’s oldest parlor trick; Prada, Helmut Lang and Calvin Klein had fashion devotees worshipping their minimalist altars way back in the ’90s, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto put functionality first earlier in the ’70s, and even the Olsen’s anonymity-trick was famously propounded by Martin Margiela in the ’80s.

Now, as the ’90s-babies that the Olsens are, The Row reads more like fashion fanfic to the greats rather than a unique proposition on its own. But instead, it’s the twins’ commitment to the bit – for the 2026 season, the hot new color they unveiled is “mineral gray” – that continues to inspire countless copycats.

And if The House of Gucci was any indication, that isn’t always a good thing.

Unpacking the Margaux Mania

The most fascinating thing about the Row’s Margaux isn’t that it became an It bag despite lacking all the usual it-bag trappings – it’s when it became one.

Released in 2018, it had existed peacefully in the backwaters of The Row website for years before exploding into the it-purse scene early in 2023 — right when fashion collectively decided monograms were gauche, wealth should look like it had nothing to prove, and Succession’s ludicrously capacious tirade laid the logo-bag to rest once and for all. Or did it?

In other words, the Margaux didn’t chase the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist caught up to it. Its meteoric rise felt inevitable. Not trendy. Not viral. Inevitable. Industry observers often say it-bags function as barometers of cultural mood. And the Margaux measured a very specific pressure system: post-COVID, post-maximalism fatigue tinged with a longing for permanence. Truly capacious, yet completely logo-free, it answered a question people didn’t know they were asking yet: what does status look like when status stops performing?

As the old adage goes, money screams and wealth whispers. And with The Row Margaux, there was absolutely no screaming in sight.

That is, until TikTok got involved. And then came the copycats.

Designers began releasing their own interpretations of the Margaux vocabulary: some with softened top-handles, others with curved silhouettes, discreet hardwares, neutral colorways, spacious interiors. With every unboxing came longer waitlists and spikes in resale prices, and versions appeared across the board from Prada to Zara.

So, in true Olsen fashion, the twins decided to phase out the Margaux. While its actual discontinuation is a myth that continues to be debated, the news did fuel the scarcity around the style, intensifying the manhunt around a potential successor (the Marlo! The Marcel! Manu Atelier! Khaite!). After all, fashion, like Hollywood, loves a sequel. And the Peggy might just be it.

Enter Peggy: Successor or Side-Character?

When I first saw the Peggy in the wild – and by “the wild” I mean on Kendall Jenner (famously a Margaux stan) – I almost hadn’t clocked that the Peggy is, well, not the Margaux. Shorter, tighter, more distilled, at first glance, it registers as a close cousin: the same logo-less restraint, the same soft structure, the same silhouette you recognize more by instinct than by detail. It speaks the same design language fluently — just in a quieter tone.

Which did lead me to wonder: are Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen, in pop-culture speak, reheating their own nachos?

And that’s not so much in a lazy, sloppy way — like how some brands are simply copy-pasting reissues from their archives – but in a knowing way; for the longer you look, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t a copy as much as a recalibration. Where the Margaux felt like a bag for people with places to be and things to carry — laptops, notebooks, backup plans, the Peggy belongs on the arms of someone who’s already edited their life down to the essentials. It doesn’t want to hold everything. It just wants to hold enough.

But more than that, the Margaux has now come to represent a certain try-harditude, something anyone with money can buy (hence its discontinuation) to opt into the attention economy of it all. The Peggy, on the other hand, eschews that attention. It’s polished and restrained, and like the Olsens’ diktat of phoneless runway show-invites, exclusive on a whole new level.

Of course, the usual early-adopter crowd – editors, stylists, the people who somehow always know before everyone else — have already slipped it into rotation. A few colors have sold out too. But that doesn’t guarantee it would necessarily become the next Margaux.

And if you asked me, it shouldn’t either. It has its own charm, after all!