Elise By Olsen – Kinfolk

By Olsen wears a suit by Acne Studios and shoes by Bottega Veneta. Left: She wears a dress by Balenciaga.

“I feel like I don’t really have a relationship to my age,” Elise By Olsen tells me over Zoom from her bedroom in Oslo, Norway. “I just had my 21st birthday two weeks ago, and I was thinking about how my age has been taken away from me. The press always focused on the whole ‘youngest editor’ thing. It’s a box the media has put me in since day one.”

It’s understandable why the media might focus on the “whole youngest editor thing” when writing about Olsen. At the age of 13, she launched a youth culture magazine, Recens, making her the world’s youngest editor-in-chief (she couldn’t claim the Guinness World Record, ironically, because she was too young for their age restrictions). Eight years later, the Norwegian is the very model of a precocious Gen-Z multi-hyphenate, with two magazines under her belt, consulting work at a dream list of fashion companies and the recent establishment of an international fashion library in Norway.

Given these achievements, I had expected that speaking to Olsen would be a serious affair, yet in conversation she proves quick and chatty, able to turn on a dime from full-on discourse mode to wry humor. After five years of traveling the world for work, she is grounded—back in her childhood bedroom in the basement of her parents’ house. Her homecoming wasn’t due to COVID-19, but because her father fell seriously ill two months before the pandemic. “I went home and felt I needed to stay around for his recovery,” she explains. “I had just started to feel so un-present in everything that has to do with my life.”

So in January 2020, Olsen decided she would spend the year at home. She gives me a webcam tour, pushing back ice-blonde hair—dyed the same spectral shade as her eyebrows— and revealing subtle black tattoos on each wrist. There is a desk, underneath a striking photo of an androgynous youth with a huge mane of curly ginger hair, taken by Norwegian photographer Torbjørn Rødland. On the other side of a dividing wall is a cozier sleeping space, where big fashion books and magazines with colorful spines are arranged on a wireframe shelf “for private research.” Opposite, a bed is tucked snugly between the walls, overlooked by a large television which protrudes on a metal arm. She looks at it and giggles. “It’s such a bachelor pad thing to have,” she says.

Hair & Makeup: Malin Åsard Wallin

By Olsen wears a vintage shirt, shorts by COS, a collar by Miu Miu and jewelry by Bottega Veneta.

Olsen was born in this eastern Oslo suburb in 1999, and started her first blog at the age of eight—largely an outlet for concerns about homework and family dinners. In 2012, she and a group of friends launched Archetype, a popular Scandinavian blogging network for teens, splitting the cost of website upkeep between themselves. This inspired Recens, the youth culture magazine she founded at 13. Its first issue was a bit of a mess. “We put it together on a Word document,” she says. “The images were super pixelated, the paper felt weird and there were grammar mistakes. But I wanted it to be in English, an international magazine, because I had that ambition. I wanted that audience.”

Recens aimed to center the creative narratives of young people by allowing them to tell their own stories. It sat strangely in the fashion industry, which is obsessed with youth—but to look at, rather than to listen to. Olsen was not the only young person challenging fashion orthodoxy at the time; over in the US, a teenage Tavi Gevinson was gaining popularity for her fashion blog, Style Rookie. But unlike Gevinson, Olsen focused on print media. After the first issue of Recens, which she funded using her own money, she started to attract advertisers and began collaborating with her business partner and art director, Morteza Vaseghi, then twice her age. He helped transform the magazine into a glossy, professional publication which pointedly ignored the prevailing trends of Scandinavian minimalism, matte paper and monochrome fashion spreads.

Her parents, who worked in customs and logistics, were unperturbed by their 13-year-old daughter going straight from school to an office to work on her magazine. They thought it was just a phase—but it never passed. Recens took off and Olsen dropped out of high school at 16 to work full-time. Working so young, she encountered a lot of preconceptions about her parents. “People believe I come from a cultural family or that my parents have been pushing me,” she says, “but there was none of that. It’s been very organic, and if I wanted to stop doing this today, they’d support me.”

Over seven issues, Recens featured contributions from more than 500 people around the world, most of them under 25. It was a hit. And yet, just before her 18th birthday, Olsen decided to resign on principle: She considered it inauthentic to edit a youth magazine as an adult. By then Olsen was already considered a spokesperson for her generation—a TEDx talk she gave in 2016 is titled “A Manifest from Generation Z.” While she now feels uncomfortable speaking for anything beyond her own experience, Olsen was at the vanguard of a social shift over the past decade which has seen younger people’s voices being taken more seriously.

One of the striking anachronisms of Recens is that it was a print-only publication helmed by a digital native. Olsen has loved print since she was eight years old, when she used her pocket money to buy copies of Dazed and Vogue Italia from newsstands. “Back then, print felt like an antidote to the digital mindset I had,” she explains. “It was the sensory connection, the smell and touch of it. I also liked the different pace—sitting down and giving all my attention to one object, not being stimulated by a bunch of different things like when you consume information online.”

Olsen channeled this love into her second publication, Wallet, which she launched at 18. Wallet is more intellectual than Recens, and its form is just as provocative as its content. She analyzed declining print sales and decided big magazines were inconvenient, so she made Wallet an “anti-coffee table book”—slim enough to fit into a jeans pocket. Its ads are on perforated pages that can be torn out and there are blank pages at the back for note-taking. All of this encourages readers to interact with Wallet, to revel in its physicality and make it their own.

Wallet’s manifesto is to “redeem fashion journalism,” a barbed response to magazines devoid of cultural and institutional critique, where independent thought comes second to advertisements and branded content. “Fashion is traditionally looked on as a feminine field. It’s something rich husband’s wives play with on the side, not deemed worthy of critique like film or art,” Olsen says. Wallet addresses the conversations that the fashion world isn’t having: “It’s about understanding the operations around fashion: the politics, the money, and the power.”

Wallet has become essential reading for people seeking a critical lens on the industry, yet Olsen is planning to wrap it up after the 10th issue. This marks a trend in her professional life—perhaps, like her parents first suspected, each of these projects is just a phase before she moves on to something else. She offers a different explanation: “It feels like in fashion, people hold onto their positions for way longer than is needed. Look at Anna Wintour at Vogue. She is, in my opinion, completely irrelevant, steering the publication in a way which is fatal. Just knowing when to stop is important.” Here, too, Olsen is riding the first wave of a societal shift: toward a 21st-century globalized industry of freelance creatives, digital nomads with shapeshifting careers who embrace their freedom, but perhaps worry about the absence of the professional security that their parents took for granted.

“In fashion, people hold onto their positions for way longer than is needed... Just knowing when to stop is important.”

Publishing three issues of Wallet per year has not stopped Olsen from taking on a dizzying array of other jobs: curating art exhibitions, producing films, giving talks which are so popular that one about rethinking publishing was printed in book form last year. In 2018, she bought and renovated a 2,000-square-foot warehouse on a vineyard outside of Lisbon, Portugal, turning it into a studio-cum-living space, an experiment to see what she could get for the same amount of money as a tiny space in New York or London.

After this half-decade of “accelerated living,” returning to roost in Oslo was a tough transition. “I felt like I was in lockdown from the moment my father got sick,” she says. “It’s been kind of lonely since my friends are spread out around the world, but actually it’s been good for me. I spent these months confronting my feelings and I felt very balanced. There’s a lot of nature near where I live. Oslo is like that, you can take the metro five minutes away and you’re in the woods.” Regular walks were an important part of her father’s recovery, but Olsen also found them grounding. “I process a lot when I walk,” she says. “It’s like therapy.”

She has used this time and focus to zone in on a new project—helming the launch of the International Library of Fashion Research in Oslo. It is pitched as a repository for fashion’s printed material which includes, alongside books and magazines, commercial publications usually ignored by libraries such as lookbooks, catalogs and advertising posters. “I think that side of fashion is important to embrace because it’s such an inherent part of the industry,” Olsen says. “The creativity is very dependent on the commercial side.”

The seed collection was donated by cultural critic and New York scenester Steven Mark Klein, one of several older figures who Olsen counts as a mentor. He packed up the publications, which filled a whole shipping container, and sent them by boat to Oslo, where the library has been offered a home by Norway’s National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. The library’s digital incarnation opened in October 2020 with more than 5,000 publications available, though you cannot read them page-by-page, due to complications around publishing rights. The physical library is set to open in the spring, overseen by a board Olsen assembled including luminaries from Comme des Garçons, Prada and i-D Magazine.

Whether she’s saving fashion’s printed material or fighting to revolutionize its journalism, Olsen presents these missions in the language of responsibility. Plenty of teenagers feel frustrated by the cultural landscape, but few decide that it’s their job to change things. Why, I ask, does it feel so personal to her? “It’s a frustration I’m trying to grapple with, like creating the fashion library I wish had existed when I was younger,” she says. “I have responsibilities toward my team, my readers, and especially the younger people who come along with me for the ride.”

“It’s a lot to take on,” I say. “It’s a lot to take on, indeed it is,” she says, before smiling nervously and gazing out of her small bedroom window at the gray Norwegian sky. She looks like she’s about to say something, and then thinks better of it. “It is, yep.”

I ask how she reflects on her behavior as an editor-in-chief at 13, looking back. She thinks for a moment. “I had this naivety that young people have. It’s good that I didn’t know the reality of the fashion industry and the world at that age, because I would have become so cynical. But if I could give advice to myself back then, I’d say to go even harder. You have nothing to lose. Now I’m 21 and I can’t hide behind my youth anymore. Back then it was the only thing to do—get up and out.”

Though Olsen says she feels like her age has been taken away from her, it seems to me that she has always been totally in control. She used her youth while it was useful, and now that she has grown up and is taken more seriously, she has shrugged it off as easily as a winter coat.

In 2018, Gucci sponsored a short film about Olsen entitled Youth Mode, chronicling her work with Recens and her decision to resign at 18. In it we see an Olsen not often depicted in the media: laughing hysterically, dancing in a club, sitting in a bathtub and joking with friends. Being a normal teenager. I ask if she deliberately cultivates such a serious image in the press. She shrugs. “I feel like that’s a very personal side that I don’t feel the need to share.”

The film ends with a teasing moment where an unidentified voice over the phone asks: “Do you ever feel like you missed out on anything, finding success so young?” The phone hangs up and the question goes unanswered as the credits roll. I bring this moment up with Olsen.

“You didn’t answer that question in the film,” I say. “Will you answer it now?”

She smiles. “It’s a question I hear a lot from my family, friends and people in the industry: ‘Do you feel like you’ve grown up too fast, or missed out on your youth, or whatever?’ Honestly, I don’t know the alternative. I feel like I’ve had a great childhood and teenage years. I’ve seen parts of the world at a very young age, met amazing people and had incredible conversations. That’s fun to me.” She looks out the window again. “I’ve chosen it, you know? And if I wanted something else, I would have chosen otherwise.”

“If I could give advice to myself back then, I’d say to go even harder. You have nothing to lose.”