BIANCA CHANDON/917
ALEX OLSON
“Maybe it’s his shy confidence or loose perfection, but Alex Olson’s become skateboarding’s favorite enigma.” So speaks the bio on Olson’s athlete page on the website of Nike, for whom he skates. Olson’s first memory of skateboarding is at the age of six, his dad Steve was in his time also a pro skater, and – thus far – skateboarding has been his chief practice. Star spots in videos include Cherry by Supreme, for whom he also skates alongside Independent, Spitfire and one of his two brand expressions, Call Me 917.
Olson birthed this brand in 2013 after parting ways with his board sponsor. As he put it elegantly in an interview with SSense: “In order to be sponsored by another company – like Nike – you need to have a board sponsor… It’s like if you’re a big artist you need to have a big gallery. Your board sponsor is like your gallerist, so to speak.” Olson’s experimental approach to the mechanism of exhibition in the skateboarding system led a few years later to the establishment of his second brand, Bianca Chandon. Bianca Chandon, he emphasises, is not a skate brand.
As Olson explains down the phone, the first part of the name is inspired by two Biancas: Jagger and another non-famous Bianca he knows who was “kind of beautiful and unobtainable”. Chandon is in honour of the champagne scion and race car driver Olivier, and is also Olson’s own middle name. At the start, he says, “I wanted to make dresses and other garments too, but I began with 5,000 dollars, which doesn’t get you much.” Still, probably indirectly through Olson’s adjacency in New York to a community in arts, the brand was quickly taken on by Dover Street Market. “When they first approached us,” he says, “we didn’t really know who they were.” Olson says he is significantly inspired by Supreme: he lurked long in its store as a teen in LA, and now it stocks his clothing products.
In terms of his approach – and nodding to that Nike copywriting – Olson is genuinely enigmatic in that eluding definition appears central to his method, and is arguably part of his creative currency. He walked a runway show for Eckhaus Latta in September 2017, then applied a situationist’s flip by inserting footage of the action into his next skate video. As he says: “Everything is connected, the thing is just to work out how they are connected and what that means.” Olson is also in one of this issue’s fashion editorials, across on page 126.
Olson says he has considered trying to build a career as an artist, admires Martin Margiela and Alexander McQueen, then adds that at age 35 remaining limber enough to skateboard at his highest level feels increasingly King Canute-ish a challenge. Almost shockingly, when discussing Sterling Ruby, he says: “I sometimes feel jealous of those people who went through it and then came out – who learnt to see the world through the lens of skateboarding and use that lens to do other things.”