Elise By OlsenWhat does the world’s youngest editor-in-chief do when they turn 21? Tom Faber interviews Elise By Olsen—the publishing maven who’s forcing the fashion industry to actually listen to the
Elise By OlsenWhat does the world’s youngest editor-in-chief do when they turn 21? Tom Faber interviews Elise By Olsen—the publishing maven who’s forcing the fashion industry to actually listen to the
“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-hyphe...