NEW YORK — Elise By Olsen had made a name for herself at 15 as one of the world’s youngest magazine editors, having already produced runs of two print periodicals about culture and fashion from her bedroom in Oslo, Norway. One day in 2015 she received a challenging email: “Who are you?”
She answered and then came a torrent of emails peppered with links to gallery and store websites, news articles about the fashion industry and warnings about its pitfalls.
Her correspondent turned out to be Steven Mark Klein, a 64-year-old, New York-based hospitality brand consultant and fashion gadfly. For some years, he had run a blog called Not Vogue, which he used as a platform to take the fashion industry to task for being an exploiter of youth and a cynical expression of late-stage capitalism.
At first, Olsen thought he was a troll. He called himself a freelance outlaw.
Klein set out to mentor Olsen, and soon she welcomed his tutelage. Her parents were bemused but supportive. She quit high school and started another magazine called Wallet, which was inspired by Klein’s insights.
She learned that he lived alone on New York’s Lower East Side with an enormous and, it turned out, important collection of fashion ephemera, including fashion magazines, fashion show flyers, catalogs, postcards and look books from designers such as Stella McCartney, Louis Vuitton and A.P.C. — decades’ worth of printed matter that he had saved and meticulously archived.
It was his legacy, and he wanted Olsen to have it.
Klein took his own life, Oct. 25, his cousin Andrea Strongwater said. He was 70 and had been in ill health for some time.
His bond with Olsen ensured that his life’s work will live on. His archive is now a museum collection: the International Library of Fashion Research in Oslo, curated by Olsen and funded by private donors and corporate sponsors. Housed in a historic building owned by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design and next door to the Nobel Peace Center, the library will open to the public early next year, although the collection is now available online. It is a showcase for Klein’s enormous gift — 2 tons of printed matter that had filled a shipping container after it was packed up in June 2020.
