Modern classic: Maija Isola’s Unikko (‘Poppy’) fabric, 1964, has recently reappeared on everything from hats, dresses and bags to computer mouse pads   Marimekko: Fabrics Fashion Architecture Ed. by Marianne Aav New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003 336p., ill. ISBN 0-300-10183-x. US$ 75 One of my most abject failures, as a teenager trying desperately, on summer visits to my mother’s homeland, to be a Finn, occurred in the area of dress. It was the Seventies, and the interestingly alternative look that worked so well for me back in London – home tie-dyed t-shirts, smocks made from fabrics from the reject bin at Laura Ashley, (whisper it) school uniform chic – simply didn’t cut it. High teenage fashion in Kainuu, in the far north-east, was something quite different. Whether one was fashionably engaged in smoking a few illicit cigs with a bottle of Sprite (pronounced Sprait, the bottle helpfully advised) in the local baari or sitting in a shop doorway eyeing up the talent – and, incidentally, whether one was a boy or a girl – the only thing to wear was a pair of James jeans and a colourful, striped, Marimekko t-shirt (sometimes accessorised, in those far-off days, by a pair of colourful cut-off wellies made by a rubber-goods company called Nokia).     I was witnessing, had I but known it, the long Indian summer of the Marimekko phenomenon. Founded by the charismatic Armi Ratia in 1949, the company had started life in the design and manufacture of fabrics. Two years later, a fashion show held at the fashionable Kalastajatorppa restaurant in Helsinki resulted, unexpectedly, in a considerable number of orders, and Ratia set up a workshop in her home. For the rest of the 1950s, clothes were cut out at the workshop, but made up by seamstresses working at home. Ratia took on talented new designers – among them Vuokko Nurmesniemi and Maija Isola, who were to be responsible for some of Marimekko’s iconic designs – and the company was launched on its extraordinary history.     From the beginning, Marimekko represented an entirely new presence on the fashion scene. An aunt of mine ran a business as a private seamstress in Helsinki, and I remember, as a very small girl, poring over her piles of Vogue magazines, whose designs she would then proceed to knock off for her clients. Even then – and later, when my mother spent an entire summer under her tutelage, painstakingly tailoring three-piece wool suits for herself, me and my little sister – the studied elegance of the world those clothes represented was something completely foreign to me: they seemed drab and unexciting, dowdy even before their first wearing. Such was, evidently, the fashion world into which Marimekko erupted. With their loud, exciting colour palette and bold, geometric shapes, Marimekko’s clothes appealed not only to the newly liberated women who actually bought them, but also to a little girl’s sense of drama. My older cousin Titta’s Marimekko dresses, zingily bright and impossibly short, seemed the epitome of elegance – and not just in Finland. I remember her perched on the arm of the sofa in our living room in London wearing an orange mini-dress, her blonde bob, dark glasses and dangling cigarette (much disapproved-of by my father) giving her the air of a sophisticated girl about town and exciting in me not so much aspiration as open-mouthed awe.     Elsewhere, Marimekko was becoming a kind of uniform for women with a new sense of independence. Washable, and loose enough in fit to be forgiving to the figure, the company’s dresses represented a kind of simplicity that appealed to the ‘new woman’. I have to say that my ‘new woman’ aunts, whom the war, they said, had robbed of potential husbands but given careers, were not among them; but on visits to Helsinki the airily modern Marimekko shops were always on our sightseeing list, and bright Marimekko dresses added startling accents of colour to the street scene. The astonishing thing, to a child’s eye accustomed to much more sober dressing on the part of her mother (who at that period was busily taking on local colour in England with twinsets and pearls) and women even older, was that they often looked best on women in their forties and fifties. ‘The Marimekko woman is easily recognised,’ wrote Armi Ratia. ‘She may work in an office or at home, but her style in wearing dresses is to forget them.’     Publicised by photographs juxtaposing the geometric prints and dress-shapes of the designs with scenes from Finnish nature, Marimekko began to sell overseas, particularly in the United States, reaching its apotheosis when, in December 1960, the Queen of Camelot herself was photographed wearing a Marimekko dress on the cover of Sports Illustrated Magazine. Jacqueline Kennedy had bought eight Marimekko dresses and became a regular customer.     My own aspirations, as a tweenie, to this early, dressy, period of the company’s history took the shape of a faux-Marimekko mini-dress made at home out of curtain material. It didn’t look too bad in London but, not unexpectedly, gave up the ghost as soon as it had its first airing up in Kainuu. I would have loved to have worn a proper Marimekko, but it just wasn’t going to happen: first, they were, for someone dependent on pocketmoney and parental indulgence, breathtakingly expensive, even if you bought the material and made the clothes yourself; and second, the zeitgeist, no less, was against it. I was really much too young to be a Marimekko woman, and times were changing; I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel out of place in Marimekko’s lovely, glowy dresses. My fondness for the homespun and the ethnic (as well as school uniforms) did not, as my despairing parents suspected, reflect an antipathy toward prettiness, a reluctance to become a woman. It arose, in the radical tradition in which I – along with many others in the western world – was schooling myself, from a horror of the environmental and human consequences of big business and a preference for means of production that directly benefited the makers. A new ethos was in the air, and Marimekko managed to respond to the challenge early in the spring of 1968, before the student riots in West Berlin and Paris, with Annika Rimala’s Tasaraita range of stripy t-shirts, underwear, socks and nightwear, giving rise – along with the Jokapoika striped shirt – to something little short of a new kind of national dress. (Old radicals die hard: the single most shocking fact for me, in reading Marimekko Fabrics Fashion Architecture was that the cotton of the Tasaraita range was mixed with polyester – and had therefore clearly bore the mark of the devil.)     Marimekko Fabrics Fashion Architecture represents the first study for an international audience of this extraordinary company. It tells the story of its origins and growth, with a useful essay on its textile designers by the British design historian Lesley Jackson and another, by Riitta Nikula, on Marimekko’s architectural projects, including Armi Ratia’s ambitious project for a Mari-house and Marikylä community; there is also an unexpectedly rewarding analysis by Antti Ainamo of the business history of the company. But for most readers it will no doubt be the visual references offered by this handsomely produced book, along with the detailed biographies of the various designers employed by the company, that will prove most valuable.     Right at the beginning, Armi Ratia stated her intention to make every Finn want to own at least one Marimekko garment. By her death, in 1979, she had probably succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. How this came to be the case – the trail would lead far beyond the history of design, into the fields of culture, economics, politics and society as a whole – is, surely, where the real story lies. Marimekko Fabrics Fashion Architecture is a curiously old-fashioned book. It is more than a decade sinece even the academic discipline of design history acknowledged the importance of ‘consumption’ (as opposed to production) and personal choices in the use of objects – ‘the personal is political’, as the 1960s slogan had it. Too often, in discussing the significance of Marimekko’s clothes, Mairmekko Fabrics Fashion Architecture simply quotes the inspirational Armi Ratia herself. These personal recollections are offered as a token of an alternative history of Marimekko based on the real experiences of those who wore the clothes (or wanted to).     After Armi Ratia’s death, her company languished for some years before being revived by the energetic Kirsi Paakkanen, who has used her advertising and entrepreneurial skills to great effect in reviving Marimekko. Cutting manufacturing costs by relocating production to Estonia and reprivatising the company, she created sufficient freedom of movement to allow the company to become innovative again. Today its womanswear is mainly directed at the established career woman – the sort of person who elsewhere might build her wardrobe around a few Jil Sander pieces teamed with clever high-street purchases.     Paakkanen has, however, also brought back some of the iconic designs of the company’s golden age. I’ve tried some of the revised versions of vintage pieces, such as the reworkings of Maija Isola’s lovely Unikko (‘Poppy’) print; as usual they don’t seem quite right on me. But my sister has just returned from a trip to Finland with Tasaraita t-shirts for both my nephew and my two-year-old daughter, and they look just the thing.       Top of page