Hey, this shirt says "Soumi" on it!

Fashionistas discover the allure of Northern exotica

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By Jaakko Selin
     
      A yellow road sign points to the right. Ouninpohja. Now Ouninpohja is a village along the route of the annual Neste Rally Finland, and it is also the name of the rally’s most famous and revered special stage, a 33-kilometre switchback of terrifying humps on a forest road that even seasoned rally champions fear and respect.
      But when you look to the right, there is no gravel road with tyre-marks scored into its surface. Instead there is the trade fair stand of sportswear manufacturers Puma, and a clutch of yellow and black signs that say “Ouninpohja”.
      We are not in the pine and lakes landscape of Central Finland, either, but at the CPH Vision fair (it describes itself as “the Scandinavian design and streetwear exhibition”) in Copenhagen.
      Bizarre. This does not compute.
     
A similar scene is played out a few weeks later at the Who’s Next ready-to-wear fair in Paris. A Finnish clothes buyer stands slack-jawed, gazing at a long-sleeved sweater hanging on the stand belonging to a Swedish firm called Encore Clothing. Huh? What the f...? Did I have one too many Ricards last night?
      However the Finnish visitor squints and twists his head on one side, the text printed on the front of the college sweater obstinately refuses to morph into anything else.
      It reads: Muohijärvi. Muohijärvi????
      In fact, it’s even worse than that. The full text, in Finnish, translates roughly as “Muohijärvi Pinball and Sports Club”, and the effect is backed up by a logo that shows a pair of familiar pinball flippers and a ball.
      When the gobsmacked visitor then turns to see a cotton shirt with the words Lempälä Keilailu Seura (it’s misspelt, and the second and third word should be joined together, but it says “Lempälä Bowling Club” right enough), he knows there is nothing for it but to head back to the bar for Finnish reinforcements, in order to determine if he has just been struck by dyslexia or something.
     
Let’s move on to downtown Helsinki. Time: a September morning. Place: a shop window in Mikonkatu. A store mannequin is being dressed with Italian fashion items.
      The sweater going on to the male doll bears the slogan Ikirouta Äkäslompolo, as Finnish a pair of words as one could find anywhere. Well, at least anywhere that places the word for “Permafrost” and the name of a small community in Western Lapland together on the back of a shirt.
      A few seconds later there is a mini-skirted female doll next to the boy. Her top has a picture of a melting snowdrift on it, and the word Kide writ large. Yes, it’s “Crystal” in Finnish.
      The passer-by is now obliged to look upwards to double-check that the store in question is indeed an outlet of the Italian designer clothing chain Diesel, and not a new Finnish souvenir store that wasn’t here last week.
     
The Finnish language now seems to be more than acceptable for the world’s fashionistas. German-owned Puma, Swedish Encore, and Italian Diesel are not alone in their madness.
      Suomi ideas are busting out all over.
      The Spanish Often label is selling a Helsinki University shirt. The French sportswear brand Le Coq Sportif released a line of sneakers under the Helsinki name to go with the IAAF World Championships, and the Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch is presenting a wrist-watch model that is inspired by the Scandinavian countries and which features a blue-and-white reindeer.
     
What is it about Finland and the Finnish language that has got these heavy-hitters interested? It is time to check whether the world’s trendsetters have been able to predict that Finnish words are about to become a serious fashion statement.
      Promostyl and Peclers are trend-sniffers. They work at predicting changes in the public tastes and allowing their customers to make the most of them.
      Using an international network of contacts and agents reporting back, they collect information on what is moving and shaking right here, right now: what sort of music is being made in garages and cellars, what is the colour of the month for hair, what sort of magazines are being published and read, what sort of lunches are being served up...
      All these fragments of information are put together to determine in what direction our visual world is heading. The ideas are collected into “trendbooks”, which are then sold to interested companies. And the books form the basis for new fashion.
     
Well, we know that  those Huutajat male voice choir people get asked to perform quite a bit, and we know that Tapio Wirkkala’s art-glass classics are forever on show somewhere, and that the furniture ideas of the Snowcrash group of young designers get plenty of coverage, and that the offbeat films of Aki Kaurismäki introduce Finnish landscapes to the art house cinema crowd, but...
      ...No, it’s really not on. You just don’t see oddly-written Finnish place-names all over the place, and nor do you see Finnish slogans on the printed page.
     
Maybe the people behind the Ouninpohjas and the Äkäslompolos know something we do not.
      Anna-Maria Kunttu is a marketing manager with Puma. Although she is Finnish, she is not responsible for the Ouninpohja name.
      "To the Germans, Ouninpohja is a legendary and important place. They wanted to use it for their rally range. Puma has sponsored just about every Formula One team in some way or other, and now it is the turn of the World Rally Championship."
      In other words, the foreigners can now learn to speak Finnish in addition to admiring the feats of Finnish rally-drivers! Now that is downright flattering.
      "I’ve been asked to provide the Germans with instructions on how Ouninpohja should be pronounced", explains Kunttu, and she holds up a large placard, which reads "Ou-Nin-Poh-Ya".
     
On the new website of the Italian Diesel, the garments have been given Finnish names aplenty.
      Diesel is offering its customers the Kossu (!) sweater, a T-shirt named Vissy, and a knitwear item called Eukko. The assortment also includes gear bearing names like Tuoppi, Vaara, Perkele (!!), Kuokka, and a pair of trousers that rejoices in the name of Lahti. So it is the business city, after all.
      Lapland fans will be glad to know that Lahti doesn’t get it all its own way, however: there is also an Ivalo T-shirt, and residents of the old Savo Province can rush out and buy Kuopio jeans and even Savo pants.
     
There is a perfectly good reason for the Finlandisierung of the Diesel brand. Olli Wendelin, the managing director of the company’s Finnish unit, tells the story:
      “We had a couple of young designers leave from here to work as trainees in Italy. The Italians liked the way the Finns handled themselves, and now there are several of them down there. Young Finnish hands are also responsible for the company’s graphic expression and the look of the web pages.”
     
Last winter, an international team of Diesel designers arrived in Finland on a fact-finding visit. They spent some time up in Lapland looking for ideas and inspiration, and the results are to be seen in the shops now, in the fall/winter collection.
      The designers also dreamed up a strip-cartoon story to go with the clothes, entitled "The Return of the Ice Crusaders". The story is featured in Diesel brochures and extensively on the company's sophisticated web-site, where screensavers and desktop themes can also be downloaded and there is a pounding soundtrack accompaniment. There are even interactive games.
     
The ice-crusaders occasionally look  rather under-dressed for the Lapland winter and for "a thrilling voyage through below-zero conditions", particularly the poor women, but they are clad (naturally) in ice-washed denims, in which the faded parts are described as “frost-bitten”.
      Some of the clothes have a design featuring a comic-strip hero figure who is a flying pizza chef! The chef’s hat has reindeer antlers attached, and he is called Lappi-Latino.
      The mind boggles.
      "All these are going to be on sale through to next spring in 90 countries. Then it will be time to find a new place and a new culture", explains Wendelin.
     
Perhaps the most difficult thing to understand is why the Swedes, of all people, should have got on board this Suomi boom.
      Matthias Sahlin, designer and founder of Encore, jokes: "But Soumi inspires me!"
      "I was so fed to the back teeth with American college sweaters that had inane things like 'Bronx University' or 'Uncle Bob’s Bowling Hall' emblazoned on them. I wondered to myself what the world’s meanest, hardest language would be. And it’s Finnish, of course. Our Muohijärvi shirt has sold very well internationally, in fact it’s probably our most successful design. And our representative in San Francisco loves it", says Sahlin.
      Matthias Sahlin is a former surfer. On his return to Sweden he started to make casual shirts of the sort he had seen and worn around the world.
      The mistakes in the Finnish texts are quite deliberate.
      And the more Äs and Ös in the words the better.
      Underneath the neck label in the Suomi shirts there is even a little thank-you for the buyer. It reads: "Bless you for buying this so that you paid Ulla her salary and allowed me to go surfing!"
     
Ten years ago, the Finnish clothing industry went collectively belly up and bankrupt. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and all those big and easy garment orders dried up. In hundreds of companies large and small, the sewing machines were switched off for good.
      But the rag trade folk are an optimistic bunch. They put their heads together and pondered what they could do better than others: winter gear and skiing outfits...modern fur designs... Marimekko.
      That’s the stuff to delight those foreigners and win them back!
      Sadly, it was not quite as easy as that. The Finnish garment industry has recovered somewhat, but winter gear is now made in factories in China and the Baltic States. Yes, furs are still tailored in Finland, but the volume is very small. World success has unfortunately proved an elusive dream for the Finnish clothing manufacturers.
     
So let’s trade in the language instead. Funny-looking words.
      Plenty of weird letters with dots over them.
      Wacky, hard-to-pronounce place-names.
      The only shame is that it looks as if the damned foreigners have got there before us.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 5.9.2004

More on this subject:
 Seen one napa, seen them all...
 A brief Suomi-garment lexicon

Links:
  Puma - Ouninpohja (Click Dress to Impress and Statement Collections)
  Encore Clothing - Muohijärvi (sic)
  Encore Clothing - the Lempälä (sic) bowling shirt can be found here
  Diesel (beware, this site could trap you here for hours. Check out the Ice-Crusaders)
  Promostyl

JAAKKO SELIN / Helsingin Sanomat
jaakko.selin@sanoma.fi