Banker confronts challenge of poppy patterns

Mika Ihamuotila gets advice from experts on where to steer Marimekko

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By Anu Uimonen
     
      When Mika Ihamuotila stepped onto the stage as the new CEO of Marimekko, everyone focused on his outfit. The banker's pinstripe suit was gone, replaced by jeans and a blue courdoroy jacket.
      Marimekko is a national institution that is greater than the size of the company itself. Ihamuotila noted fittingly that it is Finland's largest company - in people's hearts.
      But can Marimekko really be great, and does it need to try to be? Can Marimekko be Finnish and international at the same time? And can it still have the same kind of a position as an engine of visual culture that it had in the 1950s and 1960s?
      In recent years Marimekko has been most visible as retro fashion - the recycling of patterns of decades past. The new design of today, for its part, has not typified the Marimekko trade mark as it did before.
      Anyway, is it possible for universally familiar types of classics to emerge any more?
      In the 1950s Marimekko appeared in a visual vacuum in which new kinds of textiles and clothes were easily noticed. Today clothing stores bulge with goods that change rapidly. Competition in textiles is intense.
     
"But now everything is the same and everyone follows trends", sighs Vuokko Nurmesniemi, a key designer of the early years of Marimekko. "If something different comes around, it is seen."
      Nurmesniemi believes that a strong foundation for Finnish design still exists.
      A good designer must be loyal to him, or herself, and that requires daring. "Nothing new comes from trends or from copying."
      Courage is also required from the CEO, who needs to keep his antennae out so he can decide whose ideas are worth implementing.
      It is no easy task.
      "Under no circumstances should it be said that you should do as Vuokko did", Nurmesniemi says. "The situation now is completely different."
     
"Marimekko has to pull an Ikea: sacrifice Finnishness and become multinational", says Kaj Kalin, an influential figure in the design world.
      "The best designers need to be ferreted out from all over the world, and not just Finland. The struggle for the soul of the new middle class is a bloody one. National mythology is of no value in that."
      Kalin feels that Mika Ihamuotila has the right direction when he speaks about life style. As long as one keeps in mind that life style today is determined by youth, which is today's middle class.
      "The 15-25-year-olds determine fashion, and even urban planning: what shopping malls look like, and how businesses are situated."
      Kalin observes that whereas the generation of the 1950s marched toward the utopia of modernism, their children live in the brave new consumer culture, in which the future is seen in terms of three-month increments.
      "The Marimekko of the quarterly economy is a frivolous Marimekko of shopping. It is neither ecological, nor modern."
     
Taking the opposite view is Design Museum director Marianne Aav who feels that the ideology of today that best corresponds with the thoughts promoted by Armi Ratia in the 1950s could be an ecologically sustainable "fair trade" production - alongside ethically sustainable thinking.
      "It should nevertheless be implemented in the style of the best times of Marimekko - in a fresh and lively manner."
      Aav's solution would be to clearly separate the Marimekko classics, which still seem to interest people and bring in profits, and to develop alongside it a new line and collection by the new designers.
      "At the moment, the new products do not clearly distinguish themselves from products of other manufacturers."
      The young painter Rauha Mäkilä (born 1980) has found the new, young Marimekko designers, such as Maija Louekari and Samu-Jussi Koski. "They liven up the old striped shirt and ball designs."
      For Mäkilä, Marimekko in her childhood meant high-quality domestic products, but then it lost its meaning. "And a total ‘no' came when Marimekko bought a fur company."
      Mäkilä is not interested in retro. She feels that the poppy design has been overdone. "I have a Marimekko shower curtain: birches by Maija Louekari. But I don't want a poppy-pattern TV or cell phone."
     
It is appropriate to direct conflicting expectations toward Marimekko, because it has always managed to use many different kinds of sources.
      At the shop of Marimekko's Kämp Gallery, Kaj Kalin shows how the "quintessentially Finnish" collection of goods and clothes reflects influences from the east and west - a romanticised Russian style, as well as international modernism.
      "In the atmosphere of the Cold War and during the age of Kekkonen, Armi Ratia was able to ingeniously couple Chechovism with constructivism."
      "Do we have any other company that would have been as politicised a field in both foreign and domestic policy?"
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.11.2007


Previously in HS International Edition:
  New Marimekko CEO says serious illness led to change of direction (1.11.2007)
  Kirsti Paakkanen to surrender ownership of Marimekko (31.10.2007)
  Finnish Marimekko finds buyer for Grünstein furs (20.12.2004)

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ANU UIMONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
anu.uimonen@hs.fi