CAREERS | FASHION
From Issue #18
Star Designer Judy Swartz
The Stylist Behind The Olsen Twins
by James Chung
One day in class, you’re doodling flowers in your notebook. Another
day, you’re working with celebrities and designing clothes that
millions of teens wear. Anything is possible if you wait for that one
day, like Judy Swartz.
Judy is the designer for celebrity twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
For almost a decade now, Judy has helped the twins with all things style,
whether she’s creating the outfits the girls wear in music videos or designing
the clothes and accessories that are sold under the highly successful mary-kateandashley
brand at WalMart.
“The girls play a very important part in the fashion line; it is their name of
course,” says Judy. “They absolutely trust me because I’ve been with them
for nine years.” With the twins in school, Judy has become their eyes.
She travels throughout Europe to see the upcoming fashion lines in London,
Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Amsterdam, and she also visits Japan, New York
and Los Angeles, searching for the latest trends. When she returns, she
meets with the twins to discuss the newest inspirations. “Sometimes they're
together on a decision, on a design, and sometimes they're apart,” she says.
But styles change, and so do people, especially teenagers growing up.
“I went to the house and was going through their closets looking for something, and I saw some shirts in
there that I would never think, in a
million years of shopping for them,
would be something they would wear.
They were beautiful shirts, but just a
different look.”
To keep up, she looks everywhere for
potential fashion ideas. “A lot of the
inspiration comes from the runway or
the people on the street, or a building on
the street that makes me think, ‘Oh my
God, that’d be a really cool shirt,’” she
says. Her ability to look at the world
differently helped her see that tweens
were being ignored by the fashion world,
so she launched the mary-kateandashley clothing line for tweens, a mega-brand
that now sells over US$500 million
worth of clothes a year.
Judy has come a long way from the days
her school friends would drag her to the
mall to critique new outfits. “I couldn't
explain why something looked good on
them, but I knew it looked good on
them,” she says. After finishing a
two-year Fashion Design program at the
University of Nevada-Reno, Judy took a
sales job at Suzy Creamcheese, a fashion
shop that catered to stars back in the
‘70s, “I really had a great education just
working and designing in the shop and
working with the celebrities.”“The owner wasn't really happy with theway I looked,” she recalled. “It was very
avant-garde and high fashion, and I
looked like a young Suzanne Somers,
very conservative.” But she changed
the owner’s opinion by working her way
from sales to design within a year.
“If you persist and you work really hard
and instead of asking, show the person
what you can do, you naturally
progress,” she says.
Luckily, she had persistence because
she’d need it. “I worked for free for many
years because I was willing to do
anything to get there,” she says. “One of
my biggest disappointments was going
on interviews, knowing that the artist
liked me, the managers liked me, they
liked my ideas, but I didn't get the job,
and I couldn't figure out why. Sometimes
you just never get to know why. But the
next day, I'd lift my head and make some
more phone calls and get out there.”
There were lots of disappointments, and
at one point she questioned whether she
was wasting her time. Frustrated, she
made up her mind that she was done,
she was going to quit, move back to
Vegas and marry her old sweetheart.
Then the phone rang.
“I got a phone call to design a cover of a
German magazine for Linda Gray when
Dallas was the hottest show on,”
she says. “I have no idea today where
they got my name and my number, but
not only did they want me to direct her,
they wanted me to do the set, too.”
From there, she started to get more
phone calls. She found herself working
on music videos with musicians like
Janet Jackson and Phil Collins. She also
got calls from TV producers and ended
up working with Richard Dreyfus, Whoopi
Goldberg and other celebs.
A music video director put her in touch
with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.
“I designed their first music video, and
fell madly in love with them, and now it's
been nine and a half years,” she says.
“They were so cute and so much fun,
there was no other place to be.”
Over nine years later, Judy still works
with the Olsens and for Dualstar
Entertainment Group. The company,
which was created to market the Olsen
twins, sells over $1 billion worth of
Mary-Kate and Ashley stuff in a year.
Although Judy was named Senior Vice
President, she still loves the designing
part of her days. “It fulfills my need to
be creative every day,” she says. “It's
who I am, what brings me the most joy.”
Not surprisingly, she hasn’t forgotten
her past, and refers to it when asked for
advice. “If you have the passion to
design and you have a goal and you have
an eye on the ball and don't deviate from
that and keep moving forward and you
don't let the outside world detour you
from what you want to do, you can make
it,” she says. “If you feel it in your heart,
then you need to do it — whether it's
fashion or another field.”
Mary-Kate and Ashley are still very involved with their clothing
line,
often surprising Judy with their style choices.
