Angel Olsen on Her Bespoke, Old World Vision of Fashion

When I meet Angel Olsen at a bar in Greenpoint this past August, she’s a bit burnt out. She’s just received some bad news regarding a friend of hers; she’s also in the thick of promoting her new album, All Mirrors, and beginning a lengthy tour, which extended to playing a series of headlining shows in Brooklyn this past weekend. “I keep having to switch gears from talking about the record, doing photoshoots, trying to look interesting—trying to wear beautiful dresses and get into it—but I also get depleted, because I know I have to go home and learn how to program my synth and actually do the fucking thing,” she says.

In spite of this fatigue, the Asheville, North Carolina-based artist excitedly shows me the knockoff Vogue T-shirt that she’s wearing—a handmade, abstract black-and-white design that her friend made and framed with the classic Vogue lettering, worn in anticipation of speaking with me. She also lights up when showing off her new tattoo, which she got in Lisbon during her sole vacation of the summer. “I went with my best friend who’s a DJ, and he has this little chihuahua. We were just in the streets singing fado and we both got tattoos—this is the first I’ve ever gotten.” It’s based off a post she saw on the oddball Instagram account History Cool Kids. “A Swiss taxidermist created a 3D model of this Siberian princess whose body was completely preserved. She was 2,500 years old and covered in tattoos. They found some weed next to her, and they found out that she had breast cancer, so she was smoking to ease the pain. It’s a really powerful image and it just kept coming back to me,” Olsen says. She thought she was going to get a mini labyrinth or a compass tattooed on her arm, but instead she went with the swirling, almost Pegasus-like design that the mummified princess had etched into her shoulder.