Consumer Kids

Mary Kate and Ashley Ol­sen, the 15-year-old twin daughters of a Cali­fornian mortgage-bro­ker, are rumoured to be the most powerful women in Hollywood. You might not have heard of them yet, but the evidence suggests that almost everyone else has: the teen dynamos are the subject of many books, and their website - receives 270 million visitors a year.

The sisters have a buffed finger in every conceivable money-making pie. They have released an album called I Am the Cute One, starred in countless television programmes, and designed clothes for America's Wal-Mart stores. They have even been immortalised in plastic, in a range of dolls called "Barbie's celeb­rity friends".

But, unlike their chum Barbie, they don't just spend all day chang­ing into different outfits. As well as their prospering stage careers, the girls hold down day jobs running their production company, Dualstar Entertainment, which was set up for them soon after their fifth birthdays. It is now valued at £260 million. Their next album really should be called I Am The Extremely Rich One - but then, for the perky Olsens, cute and loaded have added up to the same thing.

Why should we, in drizzly Britain, care about a couple of Californian` moppets with streaky blonde hair and toothpaste smiles? Because now that they have conquered America, they are coming over here. More specifically, they are coming to Wal­Mart's British subsidiary Asda, the supermarket chain where you pay less (Cherryade! Save 5p a litre!) and "pocket the difference". The store itself might now be feeling rather short of change having stumped up a reported £1 million for the twin’s fashion line, which will be available next month. It is whispered that the girls themselves might jet in for the launch party. According to an awe­struck Asda spokesman: "These girls are very big."

Before we uncork the fizzy-pop and make shelf space for these "very big" 15-year-olds, however, perhaps we should ask why they have grown so huge. The answer lies in their most obvious attribute: youth. For they are not merely child stars, but the knowing figureheads of a power­ful new demographic phenomenon, the "tweenager". It is composed of girls aged between six and 14 who, trapped in the netherland between dolls and dating, have spurned Dis­ney for the delights of shopping.

The all-consuming tweens crave things beyond a celebrity franchise. Mary­ Kate sweetly told one interviewer: "We're able to help kids and lead them on the right tracks." And indeed they are - just as long as it's the track that goes through the store, towards the groaning shelves of Ol­sen merchandise

Still, it is a brand which - when it hits Asda - is unlikely to do your children much harm. For the twins are the smiling standard-bearers of middle-class California. They are not absolutely identical (Ashley is right­-handed and likes "going to the beach"; Mary-Kate is left-handed and likes horses), but both are pretty, polite, and claim to^-, be “normal".

They attend a "modest private school" in Los Angeles (where, per­haps abnormally, they have never been in detention); they are in the joint custody of amicably divorced parents; and they earn $11? (E6,25)_ pocket money a week by doing household chores, a fact eagerly dis­seminated by their agents. At the age of nine, they were overheard pri­vately discussing their "salary". Ash­ley thought they must be earning $5 a week: "No way," said Mary-Kate, "it must be at least $10." Today, the pair are savvier about their assets, and have even been heard musing on the lure of owning their own je

"They have a really wholesome image," explains a Dualstar execu­tive "No sex, drugs or rock'n'roll." The girls are blissfully free of body­piercings - even in their ears - and lacier British children might find their clothes slightly dull. The Ol­sens have a penchant for cashmere jerseys and fashion authorities pre­dict that their Asda collection will feature "modestly cut crop tops" and co-ordinated toe-rings. They do have boyfriends - both date school­friends - but, as Ashley explains, "if I a guy likes us, most of the time it's because of who we are and not what we do."