mimi called me alice at the new york times

she called me alice at the new york times.

my supervisor there. she said i reminded her of alice in wonderland. she did not mean it as a job description. she did not mean it as a project plan. she meant it as a recognition — a small soft permission to be the thing i already was.

i kept the name.

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my roots of becoming —

i did not study to be alice saga. i became her slowly, by accident, with my hands in the work long before anyone had a name for what i was doing.

before that — there had been writing, and there had been styling, and there had been the blog (i started writing it before blogs were cool, before people would admit they kept one, so i wrote into the quiet). i was already making something. i did not yet have a name for it.

the name came from another woman — far from home, with kindness in her sentence — who saw me clearly and named me with a smile.

then she sent me back into my own life with a permission slip i did not know i had been waiting for.

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i took the name home.

i took it to stockholm. and in stockholm i found another flicka. and the two of us began.

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her name is martina olsson.

she was the photographer. i was the stylist. that is what the credits will tell you. but that is not what we were.

what we were was two flickor in stockholm who met for wine before every shoot and stayed for hours and built the entire world of the picture before either of us touched a camera or a dress.

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THE SESSIONS

we would sit somewhere small — sometimes her kitchen, sometimes a bar, mostly my place — and we would talk.

we would talk about the story. we would talk about the model. we would talk about the magazine, if there was a magazine, or about who we were going to send it to, if there wasn’t.

i would have a notebook. i still have those notebooks. dozens of them. small ones, brown ones, the leather one i carried for a year, the one with the elastic that broke. each one is the trace of a conversation between two women who were trying to build something out of two heads at once.

on those pages — between the wine rings and the eyeliner smudges and the small fast drawings — is the whole shape of every shoot we ever did. before the studio. before the dress. before the model arrived.

we made it in the talking.

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WHO DID WHAT, AFTER

then we would split.

i would go and find the clothes. that was my part. i would walk through small swedish stores and i would call in dresses from designers and i would sit on the floor in my own apartment with all of it spread around me until the look was decided.

martina would do her thing. i did not always see it. she would prepare her light, her lens, her studio. she would think alone about the picture, the way photographers do — the way only they can.

then we would meet at the studio. the model would arrive. the small swedish girl, the grown woman, the boy. and the world we had built over the wine glass three weeks earlier would walk in the door and stand in front of us.

we would shoot.

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THE STORIES, BRIEFLY — as evidence of those sessions, not as the point of them

→ sleepy hollow — our first

→ piet — the second (i misremembered him as first for years)

→ emma’s dream + emma’s dream skiss (johan miderberg’s editing finished what we started)

→ a girl like betty

→ a midsummer night’s dream

→ black witch

→ camera girl

→ desire shoot

→ dear widow (two shoots, the same name)

→ grand hotel

→ lolita: ilda

→ nova for alice in wonderland (with jenny tallberg drawing over our polaroids in dealer du luxe)

→ nova for shirley temple

→ nova for the mark ryden inspired story

→ om en pojke (about a boy)

→ snowwhite — the casting that took weeks, the polaroids overlaid with jenny tallberg’s drawings, the final shoot with ilda

→ dark butterfly — siri, dealer du luxe, johan miderberg’s editing again

→ fallen angel — siri’s story, but you find her in folders that aren’t even hers

→ to eleanor — with siri, nike, emma

→ vice

→ waterlily — mickaela, our recurring muse

→ sturekatten — twice — once with a child for petit, once with mickaela grown for plaza

→ swedes — the last one we made before i left for london

i styled every one of them. martina photographed every one of them.

what was hers and what was mine became, after a while, hard to separate.

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CREDITS

photographer: martina olsson

illustrator (alice in wonderland + snowwhite stories): jenny tallberg

image editor (emma’s dream skiss + selected others): johan miderberg

recurring models: nova, ilda, mickaela, siri, emma, eija skarsgård, hannah, lovisa

styling: alice saga

(at the time — also lindha. but it was always me.)