Inside the Oslo library preserving fashion’s printed matter

It’s rumoured that the ghost of the old station master can be felt gliding through Stasjonsmesterboligen – the cream-coloured, three-floor building located at the entrance to the scenic Aker Brygge area of Oslo. Dating back to the 1920s, it was once part of the former westbound railway station, yet today the site is host to another kind of ethereal presence. 

Now home to the International Library of Fashion Research (ILFR) – the brainchild of firebrand publisher Elise By Olsen – the Station Master’s House, as the building’s name translates, holds more than 5,000 pieces of contemporary printed matter that were once destined to be discarded. This notion of the ‘station between’ shaped Olsen’s ambition to open a place where the ephemerality of the material donated by late cultural theorist Steven Mark Klein can help steer critical fashion discourse. The doors open on 29 November 2022. 

Inside the International Library of Fashion Research

What does a fashion space devoid of commercial function look like? Ahead of the library’s opening, without anything on its shelves and with piles of magazines and lookbooks swaddled in bubble wrap on the floor, Olsen joins Wallpaper* on Zoom while folding archival box after archival box. ‘The space is minimal, but it has this punch. It’s a carte blanche space for study,’ she says. 

Behind her, ranks of Formafantasma’s low-carbon, aluminium ‘T Shelf’ for Hem, wait expectantly. Olsen sits at the library’s single large study table, set by a bright window overlooking the cobbled courtyard of the Oslo National Museum. Its denim tabletop is manufactured by Kvadrat Really using end-of-life textiles and wool. Three black Luxo lamps that Olsen nabbed from the museum during its recent refurbishment are placed down the middle.

In late 2020, Olsen and the ILFR’s head of communications Else Skålvoll Thorenfeldt both read Fashion Spaces: A Theoretical View written by the Oslo-based Latvia-born architect and researcher Vésma Kontere McQuillan. Published by Frame, the book defines fashion spaces as an emerging area within architectural writing. McQuillan – who is the head of the research group TYP-0.Lab at nearby Kristiania University College – has run a project called ‘Brandscapes’ for a decade. She immediately took the ILFR on as a research challenge for her students. 

Stasjonsmesterboligen is red listed, meaning that nothing can be fixed directly to its walls and floors. The first floor is also home to a bustling museum shop, and a central circular tunnel runs through the centre of all three floors, causing some acoustic challenges. It is – Olsen, Thornfeldt and McQuillan all agree – ‘not an easy space’. 

In early 2021, 12 students began researching the geographic and conceptual context of the library; what does the space need to be? ‘We knew that this was going to be a library and hold its own collection, but we weren’t sure how the space would operate at first,’ McQuillan says. Olsen and Thorenfeldt wanted to house the growing collection but leave room for a range of diverse curatorial activities. ‘The site is very small, so we started first by thinking about the place – Oslo – and its connotations. When we decided to look at the ILFR as a museum rather than a library, the typology totally changed. We are talking about a space that is dedicated to curatorial activities. Mentally, when we began treating it as part of the museum, everything came together.’ 

The space feels futuristic: a cusp-of-the-millennium Hype Williams music-video set streamed through a splayed MacBook Air. Its materials channel varying levels of sheen, from highly reflective metallic covers on columns to the matte aluminium bookshelves. The library is a shell that reflects its contents. ‘When you get a lot of the objects into the space, it becomes full of their colour, their storytelling. I’m happy to hear that it looks futuristic because that’s the point of a library, no? It provides knowledge for the future,’ McQuillan says.

A point of departure for the project was six vitrines inherited from the National Museum. Dating from the late 1980s, their squat wooden plinths and clumsy Perspex tops have been reworked to incubate a number of different curatorial activations. Ahead of the opening, McQuillan’s second cohort of students are testing out the possibilities for exhibition making; how can they use the vitrines? How do they affix projectors into the space? Before it has even officially opened, the ILFR has become an on-site laboratory, a research discothèque. 

Nothing from the collection is going to be on permanent display, meaning that the people visiting the library – and what they are there to study – will alter its connotations. Another haul from the National Museum resulted in the arrival of three black trolleys, which Olsen is excited to put to use. ‘Nikolaas Verstraeten, who is a member of our advisory board, came over to see us. We were talking about how you get this track record, an algorithm, that might suggest something else when you are researching digitally. We wondered how we could translate that into this physical space,’ she says. 

The trolleys will be filled up with everything that has been requested and will stay untouched for a week so visitors can see what else is being referenced. Olsen says: ‘The library is trying to preserve a bunch of different expressions. Right now I am the only one here, but how will it work when people actually start sitting around the table? This project will keep evolving and growing. It’s never going to be complete.’ 

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