Celebrating 75 years of bold design | Canada Voices

In an industrial neighbourhood of Helsinki, Marimekko’s headquarters stretches across an entire city block. Its subdued exterior, all steely greys and reflective glass, offers few clues to its vibrant ethos. Inside a printing studio, sewing room and “colour kitchen” lab for mixing dyes, a team of more than 400 creatives dreams up and produces some of the design world’s most spirited patterns.

On the windows near the building’s front entrance is your first hint of the Finnish brand’s graphic signature, a pattern of giant poppies called Unikko, a Marimekko icon from 1964. It adorns almost everything the company sells, from plates to pillows, totes to towels, shirts to slippers. Unikko comes in more than 100 colour combinations, including the original: red, pink and orange.

At the headquarters, the flowers are rendered in crisp, minimalist white. Such subtlety might seem at odds with the unabashedly bold lifestyle brand, once favoured by Jacqueline Kennedy (in 1960, she wore a pink Marimekko dress on the cover of Sports Illustrated). To Rebekka Bay, Marimekko’s creative director, the dichotomy is part of the company’s identity. “Contradiction creates energy and dynamism,” she says. “That’s exactly what you also see in a lot of the original Marimekko artworks. They’re full of happy contradiction.”

Bay is Danish by birth but points out that her country shares some characteristics with its Nordic neighbour, a place of equally marked contrasts. “Finland offers 24-hour sunlight in summer but is as dark as a bottomless pit in winter,” she says. “The Finnish are among the happiest people in the world. They are also among the most introverted.”

So as much as Marimekko is known for its rainbow palette, it indeed offers starker options. While Kennedy favoured vivid looks, other notable women, including Jane Jacobs and Georgia O’Keeffe, wore dresses that were more sombre and restrained. “I think not many brands can get away with using pink with green,” Bay says. “But at the same time, we also get away with palettes that are black and white.”

Marimekko has been pulling this off for 75 years. The company was founded in 1951 by Armi Ratia, whose husband, Viljo, owned a struggling factory that made oilcloth, a textile akin to vinyl. Wanting to create a sense of optimism after the ravages of the Second World War, Ratia pivoted to fashion, producing a line of frocks that were bright, free-flowing and at odds with the conservative aesthetic of the time.

Since then, Marimekko has become one of the world’s most enduring and prolific lifestyle brands, encompassing clothing, accessories and home goods. It prints nearly one million metres of fabric each year, most of it at its headquarters. Annual sales are almost €200 million ($322 million CAD), a figure that has climbed steadily over the past five years.

Sarah Keenleyside, creative director of the Canadian art and design studio, Casa Yaya, believes the brand has thrived because it refuses to be anything but bold. She wears Marimekko clothing, including a long-sleeved technicolour dress from the 1970s and a newer piece featuring dramatic black circles and slashes on a white background.

“Too many people want their aesthetic to be safe these days,” she says. “But colour and art actually make life very special. When people break away from the beige mafia of the world, I think they are delighted by what they find.”

To Alykhan Velji, an interior designer based in Calgary who frequently uses Marimekko textiles, the brand’s secret to success is its artistry. “When I was a recent graduate, without a lot of money,” he says, “I bought about as much of Marimekko’s Lumimarja fabric as I could afford – one metre. I stretched the fabric [which resembles a pointillist spray of snowberries] over a frame I bought at Michaels and hung it like art. I had that piece for more than 13 years before selling it to another designer. And it still looked good.”

Bay says the brand is durable in part because it was designed from the outset to evolve continually. For the inaugural collection, founder Ratia commissioned various artists to create the patterns. The practice continues today, ideal for a moment when whimsy, play and the unexpected are at the forefront of fashion and decor.

“We have close to 4,000 prints in our archive,” Bay says. “We continue to work with a huge community of artists and designers around the world. Every time we add someone to that family, we hope they will bring something that doesn’t exist currently but still feels like a natural extension of our work.”

In keeping with the tradition, and for the brand’s 75th anniversary, Bay launched an artist-in-residence program, inviting Danish designer Vibeke Rohland to develop new patterns. “Vibeke produced something close to 70 prints,” Bay says. “We picked 10, including soft pastels and high contrast colours. I don’t even know if we picked the best ones – that’s the honest truth. We tried to pick the ones that continue to surprise.”

The new prints – think over-sized mathematical symbols, with repeating plus, minus and equals signs – debut this September in a capsule clothing collection designed by Finnish designer Rolf Ekroth. “We gave Rolf a really difficult challenge,” Bay says. “We told him he could not change any of the original scale, he could not change any original colourways, and he could not create excess waste.” The pieces are randomly cut, so the patterns don’t look the same on any two garments. “We save fabric that way, which is more sustainable,” Bays says. “It also means every piece is unique.”