Thirty years ago, a young woman left Sweden for Los Angeles with no fashion school training, no formula, no plan beyond instinct: just raw passion, a sharp eye, and what she'd later call "The School of Madonna." What followed became one of the most influential careers in modern styling, one that would shape the visual identities of Madonna, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Rihanna, and, most recently, ABBA's digital avatars in Voyage.
B. Åkerlund doesn't dress icons. She builds their worlds, turning a single look into a piece of storytelling, and clothing into an act of reinvention. Ahead of her In Conversation event at Light House Soho, we sat down with her to talk about where it all began, what three decades in the industry have taught her, and why, after everything, she still feels like she has "a lot of trouble to cause."
Madonna
Photographed by Luigi & Iango for Vanity Fair The Icon Issue (2023).
Light House Soho
B with Daniel Lismore outside Light House, Soho. photo by Rich Royal
Beyoncé - "Hold Up"
Styling for the Lemonade (2016) album.
You grew up in Sweden before becoming one of the most recognized names in celebrity styling. What was your first real encounter with fashion as expression?
"I think for me fashion was always expression before it was clothing. Growing up in Sweden, there was a certain idea of fitting in, and I was always much more interested in standing out. I understood very young that what you wore could change how you felt, how people saw you, and even who you could become for that moment."
"I never went to fashion school, so I didn't learn fashion through rules. I learned through instinct, music, subculture, magazines, films, vintage clothes, anything that created a world. Fashion became my language before I even really understood that it could become my career."
What was it like moving to LA at such a young age? Did that experience open your creative eyes?
"The rebellious spark was definitely already there! LA just gave it somewhere to explode... I arrived young, curious and pretty fearless. Los Angeles felt like a place where you could reinvent yourself every day. There was Hollywood, music, nightlife, vintage, costume houses, drag, rock 'n' roll, all these worlds colliding."
"I didn't have the traditional education or the big budgets in the beginning, so I had to be resourceful. I would go into costume houses and spend hours studying clothes, learning how things were made and understanding the history behind them. That became my education. LA taught me that imagination could be more valuable than money."
Editorial Retrospective
Clockwise: Madonna, "Haunted", "Ghosttown", Ghost, "Partition", Kirsten Dunst in Detour.
Britney Spears
"Work Bitch" (2013). Photo courtesy of JustJared.
"I never want someone to look like me. I want them to look like the most powerful version of themselves."
Lady Gaga - "Paparazzi"
Styled by B in her breakout music video.
How do you tailor your process to performance-driven artists?
"Every artist has their own language, their own mythology and their own relationship with fashion. My job is to understand that language and then push it somewhere unexpected."
"You listen to the music, the artist, the movement, the character, the moment in their career. Then you build a world around it. With performance especially, the costume has to do much more than look good. It has to move, survive, photograph, communicate from fifty feet away and still feel authentic to the person wearing it. That's where styling becomes storytelling."
Masterminding the wardrobes for ABBA Voyage meant designing for digital avatars. How did that change your process?
"ABBA Voyage completely challenged the normal rules of costume design because we were creating for bodies that existed digitally, but the costumes still needed to feel completely real."
"Normally, I'm thinking about how fabric moves on a physical body, how something behaves under stage lighting, how the performer feels inside it. With Voyage, we had to translate all of those instincts into a digital world. But the storytelling was still the same. We were dealing with one of the most iconic visual identities in music history, so it couldn't become nostalgia or simply recreating the past. We had to respect who ABBA were while imagining who they could be in this new universe."
Visual Language
Clockwise: "Hold It Against Me", "Haunted", "Gets Me Through", and Lemonade.
B. by Illya Ovchar, styled by herself
The Residency LA
"My career has been built around discovering people before the rest of the world knows who they are. If we believe in new talent, we need to help create a sustainable ecosystem where those creatives can actually build careers."
Looking back on three decades, what has changed the most?
"Speed. Everything is so immediate now. When I started, an image could have time to become iconic. Now an image can travel around the world in seconds and disappear almost as quickly."
"Social media has created incredible opportunities for young designers to be seen, but visibility isn't the same thing as longevity. I think one of the biggest challenges now is creating work that actually has meaning and staying original when everyone is consuming and producing imagery constantly."
"For me personally, I feel like I'm entering a really exciting chapter. Styling taught me how to create an unforgettable image; costume design gives me the opportunity to build an entire character and world. I still feel like I have a lot of trouble to cause."
Special Thanks:
B. Åkerlund (@bcompleted) : Light House Soho (@lighthouse_soho, 48 Berwick St, Soho, London) : Daniel Lismore (@daniellismore)
