North stars
In Helsinki, it’s hard to miss Marimekko: the bold, joyful prints of the much-loved textile house appear in restaurants and bars, on billboards and trams, on cushions and cutlery. They are as Finnish as reindeer and sauna. Ask any Finnish woman, and she will have an item of Marimekko, vintage or otherwise, tucked away somewhere in the wardrobe.
Today, the poppy print Unikko is the most familiar of Marimekko’s designs, but the brand was already famous by the time it was launched in 1964, thanks to the entrepreneurial force of its female founder Armi Ratia and her young designer Vuokko Nurmesniemi. Their unstructured dresses and unisex shirts and overalls, printed with stripes, zigzags and ovals in pink and orange and blue and green, brought colour and joy to a dark, depressed country struggling after the Second World War. Ratia and Nurmesniemi would lay the foundations of modern Finnish fashion.
