Marimekko: The Nordic look that defined freedom and joy (2025)

From its beginnings 70 years ago, the brand stood for free-spirited bohemianism and bold confidence. Dominic Lutyens tells the story of a trailblazing Finnish phenomenon.

Marimekko, the Finnish brand famed for its fabrics printed with splashy, outsized motifs, arose just as Finland was regaining its autonomy and forging a new national identity in the postwar years. It clearly expressed optimism but a little-known fact about the label is its bohemian pedigree. Starting out as a textile brand that soon morphed into a globally successful fashion and home-furnishing label, its fan base numbered artists and fashion icons who represented progressive values, from the glamorous Jackie Kennedy, who snapped up seven Marimekko dresses, to artist Georgia O’Keeffe.

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Marimekko's unmistakable aesthetic is indivisible from the adventurous spirit of entrepreneur Armi Ratia, who co-founded the brand in 1951. Photographs of Ratia provide powerful projections of her personality and her brand's ethos. In one photo from the 1960s, she reclines on a hammock at her summer house in the countryside, Bökars, reading The Letters of F Scott Fitzgerald, copies of Elle and Vogue on her lap – a picture of bohemian, cultured bliss. By contrast, in one 1970s image, she cuts a formidable figure at her printing factory in Helsinki sporting a swashbuckling maxi-coat, trousers tucked into boots, looking single-minded and fearless.

Marimekko is still going strong, its carefree spirit encapsulated by its spring/ summer 2021 collaboration with Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo, featuring roomy dresses emblazoned with the signature bold, colourful, large-scale prints. A book, Marimekko: The Art of Printmaking by Laird Borrelli-Persson, has been published to celebrate the lifestyle brand's 70th anniversary this year, charting how the well-connected, media-savvy Ratia – and the highly individualistic artists she hand-picked to design for her ­– shaped the label's audacious aesthetic.

"When Armi set up Marimekko, her idea was to avoid well-trodden routes in textile design," says the brand's Minna Kemell-Kutvonen. Polite, itsy-bitsy florals were the norm in the textiles world internationally then, but Ratia counterintuitively championed outsized, abstract motifs in offbeat colour combinations.

Ratia (née Airaksinen) was born in 1912 in Karelia, a province of Finland near to Russia. She studied textile design at the Central School of Applied Arts, Helsinki, graduating in 1935. That year, she married Viljo Ratia, a soldier, and opened her own weaving workshop soon afterwards in Viipuri, then capital of Karelia. As a student, she was hugely influenced by avant-garde German design school the Bauhaus, a life-long passion evidenced by the presence of a photo of its founder Walter Gropius in her office. As US design critic Jane Holtz Kay noted in a story on Marimekko in The Boston Globe in 1974: "There behind the broad desk and cascading daisies in a glass bowl. Beneath the photo of Gropius, she sits. The indomitable woman who created what must be the world's largest source of design excellence in cloth, personifies a lifestyle at once casual and total."

Kay was also struck by what she perceived to be Marimekko's egalitarian values: "The design way to defeat conspicuous consumption and class snobbery – the stick of good design beating the ills of the world."

Ratia's interest in the Bauhaus meshed with Finland's established espousal of modernism by several avant-garde architects and designers, notably Finnish architects Alvar Aalto, Eliel Saarinen and his Finnish-American son Eero Saarinen. Bauhaus member László Moholy-Nagy influenced Aalto, who designed the Municipal Library in Viipuri; it was completed in 1935 and helped to cement Finland's reputation for avant-garde design. In the postwar years, Finnish designer and sculptor Tapio Wirkkala was internationally acclaimed.

For Ratia, World War Two – during which Finland fought wars both against the Russians and Nazi Germany – was traumatic. Two of her brothers died fighting the Russians. After the war, Finland retained its independence but had to cede Karelia to Russia, forcing Ratia to leave the region. "Ratia experienced homelessness," says Borrelli-Persson. "This led her to value and find beauty in the simple things of home rather than in fancy possessions."

Resettling in Helsinki, Ratia worked as a copywriter for an ad agency, presaging her flair for publicity. "After the war, young men and women wanted to rebuild Finland," says Borrelli-Persson. "Armi was free-spirited, and rejected notions of class and traditional gender roles." On leaving the military, Viljo bought an oilcloth factory called Printex, which went bankrupt soon after. Armi joined the company in 1949 and two years later she and Viljo co-founded textiles firm Marimekko. It was launched with a fashion show at Helsinki's Kalastajatorppa Hotel. Meaning "Mary's dress" in Finnish, the name Marimekko had a universal ring to it.

More specifically, in postwar Finland there was a desire for innovation and optimism, and Marimekko was at the vanguard of this. "The brand's raison d’être from the start was to empower people to feel joy, which really resonated when national morale was low," says Kemell-Kutvonen. This happened to dovetail, she adds, with a particularly Finnish type of stoicism – sisu, meaning perseverance in the face of adversity. Moreover, Marimekko textiles, also adopted as furnishing fabrics in the home, helped to combat the gloom of Finland's long, dark winters.

Forced to pay reparations to Russia, the country was desperately short of resources, and Marimekko's use of low-cost, utilitarian cotton reflected this. In 1953, Ratia hired young designer Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi, who created the charmingly hand-drawn, pinstripe-like Piccolo print. This found its way onto the Jokapoika shirt – the brand's first men's garment, based on Finnish farmers' shirts, but soon co-opted by women – and loose-fitting dresses also designed by Eskolin-Nurmesniemi. These offered an appealingly comfortable alternative to the restrictive, wasp-waisted silhouette of the 1950s.

Ratia cherished her rural roots – a major influence on Marimekko. "A lot of prints have rustic, Slavic, rustic motifs – a throwback to Armi's upbringing near Russia," says Borrelli-Persson. But these folksy prints didn't look traditional, rendered as they were in silhouette, in a modern, graphic way. The brand was often equated with nature and freedom: in one 1960s photo, a clothed model stands in a forest, oblivious to a naked woman running behind her.

Although Marimekko flourished in circumstances peculiar to Finland, its appeal soon extended far beyond its borders, thanks mainly to links Ratia forged with the US. In 1954, Marimekko participated in the Design in Scandinavia exhibition that toured America and was represented in the Tenth Milan Triennial. It also took part in the Eleventh Milan Triennial in 1957. In 1958, Marimekko clothing was well-received in Sweden when Artek, the design firm co-founded by Alvar and his first wife, Aino Aalto, exhibited it in a gallery in Stockholm.

But a major breakthrough came when Marimekko exhibited at the World's Fair in Brussels in the same year. One of its restaurants was designed by Wirkkala who decorated its walls with Marimekko fabrics by Eskolin-Nurmesniemi. He also chose Marimekko dresses for the waitresses. Dubbed "anti-uniforms", these were also sported by the fair's tour guides.

'A uniform for intellectuals'

Marimekko's display caught the eye of architect and Harvard University professor Benjamin Thompson, who fostered Bauhaus values in the US. Thompson invited Ratia to exhibit the brand’s roomy, geometric dresses alongside homeware at his Design Research store (soon simply called DR) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established in 1953 to provide ‘good design’ for modern homes. In 1946, he and Gropius, along with six other architects, had co-founded architectural firm The Architects' Collaborative (TAC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its philosophy was that good design was to be found in everyday life.

Accordingly, Ratia and Eskolin-Nurmesniemi arrived in Cambridge with cardboard boxes filled with dresses and fabrics. The Marimekko frocks – referred to at the time as liberating both body and mind – proved a hit with students at Radcliffe College, the former Harvard University all-women's college. "Hundreds of Radcliffe girls took the dresses home to their mothers," reported fashion editor Eugenia Sheppard at the time. She also described the label as "a uniform for intellectuals", adding that "Marimekko is for women whose way of wearing clothes is to forget what they have on".

Jackie Kennedy snapped up seven Marimekko dresses; a photo of her wearing one of them was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine in 1960. Other fans of the label included prominent architecture critic Jane Jacobs. Meanwhile, a photograph of O'Keeffe at her home in New Mexico in 1962 shows her wearing Eskolin-Nurmesniemi’s smock dress printed with aubergine and lilac stripes. O'Keeffe's love of the label stemmed from her interest in the late 19th-Century dress reform movement which had been promoted in the US by feminist campaigner Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gilman also argued that housework should be shared equally by men and women and advocated women working outside of the home.

The dress reform movement – part of an early feminist movement in the West – promoted "rational dress" and railed against the Victorian fashion for crinolines, bustles, padded busts, wasp-waisted dresses and constricting corsetry that both hampered movement and was deemed harmful to health.Dress reformers championed simplified garments for activities such as bicycling or swimming.

Marimekko was extensively promoted in the US by DR, which opened shops in New York and San Francisco in 1963 and 1964 respectively. Both stocked Marimekko fabrics and clothing popular with its forward-thinking customers. By the 1970s, Marimekko was stocked by 50 retailers in the US. Crate & Barrel, the US chain of homeware shops, which opened its first store in Chicago in the then-bohemianneighbourhood ofOld Town, sold Marimekko fabrics from 1965.

Marimekko’s progressive values and creative verve were vividly captured in US photographer Tony Vaccaro's images for a story about the company published by Life magazine in 1964.

In one image, shot at Bökars, bolts of 144cm-wide fabric hang like banners from the house's first-floor windows. These showcase such outlandishly large-scale prints as Melooni (Finnish for melon) with its concentric oval motifs and Sikkikuikka (Great-crested grebe) featuring blown-up brushstrokes tracing wildly oscillating waves and chevrons in searing yellows, pinks and blues. These were designed by Maija Isola, who was a 22-year-old student when Ratia employed her. She went on to become the brand's principal designer, producing more than 500 designs until her retirement in 1987.

Marimekko was mainly staffed by women, as the same image conveys: mostly female employees, sporting equally vibrant, boxy dresses, mill around on the driveway. The mansion's front doors are wide open, suggestive of Ratia's hospitality and receptive personality. "Armi loved bringing people from different parts of society together," says Kemell-Kutvonen. Her parties at Bökars, where a diverse guestlist feasted on crayfish and white wine, "were legendary", she adds.

Isola is as closely associated with Marimekko as Ratia, and her designs emphasise the brand's bohemian pedigree. In the 1960s, she was greatly inspired by American abstract art, for example the monumental, colour-saturated canvases of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. The spontaneous look of her prints was reinforced by her expressive brushwork.

One of her prints, the 1964 design Unikko (poppy in Finnish), is the brand's most iconic pattern. It features exuberant, semi-abstract blooms, their vitality springing from the overall pattern's wayward asymmetry and ultra-pop colours; the best-known one combines hot pink, tangerine and black. The design sent a thrillingly transgressive message: Isola created it in defiance of Ratia's dislike of florals – the standard, clichéd pattern on early 1960s textiles. Still, Unikko accorded with Ratia's preference for bold patterns, and it uncannily captured the zeitgeist, chiming with pop art, notably with Andy Warhol's fluoro-bright Flowers series, also from 1964.

Foreshadowing Unikko's boldness were Isola's experimental, nature-inspired prints from the late 1950s, including Kivet, an abstract print of stones in citrus shades, and Kaivo, meaning a well. The clean colours of many Marimekko prints were achieved by avoiding the use of black ink – anathema to Ratia. Instead, tones were darkened by layering pure colours.

"As a young woman in the 1960s, Marimekko's fabrics brought brilliant new clarity and simplicity," remembers veteran British textile designer Sarah Campbell, co-founder of the design partnership Collier Campbell, formed with her sister Susan Collier. "Their liveliness defies the flat, graphic nature of their imagery due to the hand of the artist which by its nature has movement and irregularity built into it."

Isola constantly explored different design languages. In 1959, she dreamt up her overtly decorative Ornamentti (Ornament) series that reflected her enthusiasm for Slavic craft, in particular traditional embroidery and lace, producing such prints as Satula (Saddle) and Ananas (Pineapple).

For Isola, art was a joyful activity: she worked cross-legged, listening to music, an unorthodox approach she described as "dancing with the brush". Her freewheeling designs were an extension of her unconventional life. She married three times, and in 1970 took off to Paris and had a dalliance with an Egyptian scholar that led to the creation of Arab-inspired patterns. She later lived for a while in Algeria with a lover, then travelled to North Carolina, where she painted the local landscapes. Isola created several Marimekko designs in collaboration with her daughter, Kristina.

From the late 1960s, Marimekko's repertoire of styles was enriched by collaborations with Japanese designers Katsuji Ishimoto and Katsuji Wakisaka, whose furnishing fabrics complemented the playful style of Isola, who died in 2001. Wakisaka designed the 1975 print Kalikka – a faux-naif representation of houses. One Ishimoto design, Ukkospilvi (Thundercloud) of 1981, with its web of triangles, evokes the geodesic domes of avant-garde US architect Buckminster Fuller.

These motifs reflected Ratia's passion for modern architecture. In fact, her holistic vision of Marimekko as an entire lifestyle saw her plan a utopian village called Marikylä (Mari village) for her employees as part of her game plan to optimise their quality of life. Designed in the early 1960s by architect Aarno Ruusuvuori, it never materialised. However, employees at Marimekko's factory enjoyed other perks, including regular coffee breaks, hairdressers who styled their hair while they worked, saunas, a breakfast table, an open fire, and a summer cottage.

Marimekko’s fortunes dipped in the 1990s but were revived by new owner Kirsti Pakkanen. Today a woman – Tiina Alahuhta-Kasko, the brand's current CEO – still runs the firm. One reason for Marimekko's enduring popularity is its innate concern for sustainability, which originates from a hand-me-down culture whereby mothers in Finland passed their dresses on to their daughters. The brand is set to formalise this tradition: it has just launched its Pre-Loved scheme, selling clothing mainly from the 1960s to the 1980s on its website. For some years,Marimekkohas investigated environmentally friendly manufacturing processes, including the possibility of makingclothes frombiodegradable wood fibres.

Annika Rimala, another well-known Finnish designer, who worked for Marimekko from 1960 to 1982 – creating her radically innovative unisex Tasaraita collection of 1968, typified by striped T-shirts, still popular today – succinctly characterised the spirit of Marimekko thus: "Clothes needed to be designed so that it was possible to move freely in them – to run, jump, and sit or, for that matter, to protest."

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