Designer of the Month: Marimekko

Week 4: later textile and fashion design

Elle Cover featuring an Annika Rimala dress. Courtesy of the Marimekko Blog.

Armi Ratia's eye for young talent continued to shape Marimekko's aesthetic to the company's credit long after its early years. In 1958, Ratia took Marimekko to the World's Fair in Brussels, and the company's designs were thus introduced to an international audience, with Design Research stores soon opening in New York and San Francisco.[1] Although it was around this time that Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi left the company, the next wave of Marimekko designers were well suited for their new roles in upholding the international image of a successful design brand. In particular, Annika Rimala, Marimekko's fashion designer from 1959-1982, picked up seamlessly where Eskolin-Nurmesniemi had left off.[2]

Liisa Suvanto, Marimekko Ruuturaita Pattern, 1974. Courtesy of the Marimekko Blog.

Originally trained as a graphic designer at the Institute of Industrial Arts in Helsinki, Rimala proved to be a champion of the types of printed patterns that had been popularized by Eskolin-Nurmesniemi, with her designs reflecting a strong sense of graphic awareness.[3] While Rimala began her tenure at Marimekko designing bold graphic prints, which would remain in fashion through the mid-1960s, by the end of this decade, having pushed patterns as far as they could go, the only option that remained was to downsize and embrace uniformity.[4] "Rimala's solution was the Tasaraita (even stripe) collection of cotton jersey casualwear, launched in 1968," explains Lesley Jackson in an essay about Marimekko's textile design; "A runaway hit throughout the 1970s, Tasaraita replaced the flamboyant individualism of large-scale patterns with the high-voltage intensity of saturation stripes."[5] Designer Liisa Suvanto, who was invited by Ratia in 1960 to design Marimekko's "woolen line," and who came to the company on a full-time basis from 1963-1975, represented the next big change for the company.[6] An established textile designer with her own firm and more than 20 year's experience, she developed an elegantly sculptural line of clothing for Marimekko based on the plain and simple cuts of Balenciaga.[7]

 Fujiwo Ishimoto, Kesanto cotton. Courtesy of Marimekko.

The 1970s saw other shifts for Marimekko as well, including changes to the company's furnishing fabrics with the recruitment of two Japanese designers, Katsuji Wakisaka, who worked for Marimekko from 1968-1976, and Fujiwo Ishimoto, who joined the company in 1974 and remains chief furnishing fabric designer to this day.[8] Although these second-generation Marimekko designers introduced new aesthetics to the company, their designs helped expand the Marimekko style and make it more accessible to a world-wide audience.[9] Wakisaka's designs, with their bright pop patterns often drawing inspiration from the idiom of children's drawings, blurred the line between the living room and nursery.[10] Ishimoto's work, on the other hand, with its brushstroke-like and textural patterns, as well as his focus on contrast rather than coordination, were distinctly Japanese in nature, yet managed to uphold Marimekko's overall aesthetic and tradition of maximization.[11]

Pentti Rinta, Marimekko Kuski Suit, 1973. Courtesy of the Marimekko Blog.

The final Marimekko designer whom I want to talk about today came to the company during the new round of innovations that were occurring during the 1970s. Pentti Rinta, who worked at the company from 1969 until the mid-1980s, had the distinction of being the first Marimekko designer to have actually been trained in fashion (at the Institute of Industrial Arts, naturally).[12] Adept at designing for the new, casual, "everyday" style of the 1970s, Rinta's philosophy was that clothes should be comfortable to wear, with being fashionable a secondary concern.[13] As Riitta Anttikoski describes this change in Marimekko's design culture:

If in the early years of Marimekko Nurmesniemi had liberated women from the restrictive clothing of the era, then in the 1970s Rinta freed men from the yoke of the pinstripe suite with his Kuskipuki (coachman suite, 1972)...Ostensibly, the design developed out of necessity. Rinta was leaving for Paris and had made himself a comfortable black corduroy suit to wear on the journey. When Ratia saw it, she told him: "Put it into production!"...The Kuski suit became the uniform of architects, artists, editors, and other professionals. It was later made in fabrics other than corduroy and was adapted for women.[14] 

Rinta's other real breakthrough as a designer came in his 1975 summer collection, for which he produced a new version of the classic shirt dress that suited a wide range of ages and body types, literally typifying the idea of clothes designed for all.[15] While the 1970s saw major changes for Marimekko's designs, and a host of designers to help them along, the biggest change was yet to come with Ratia's death in 1979.[16] The following decade was a difficult one of Marimekko, but the 1990s once again saw the company reinvent itself while simultaneously rediscovering its roots, once again growing into the internationally-recognized brand that remains today.[17]


[1] Marimekko online, "About Marimekko: Timeline," http://us.marimekko.com/unfold/timeline, (accessed November 28, 2012).

[2] Lesley Jackson, "Textile Patterns in an International Context: Precursors, Contemporaries, and Successors," from Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, ed. Marianne Aav (New York: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2003), 67.

[3] Ibid., 67.

[4] Ibid., 67.

[5] Ibid., 67.

[6] Maria Härkäpää, "Selected Biographies of Marimekko Designers," from Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, ed. Marianne Aav (New York: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2003), 300.

[7] Ibid., 300.

[8] Lesley Jackson, "Textile Patterns in an International Context: Precursors, Contemporaries, and Successors," from Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, ed. Marianne Aav (New York: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2003), 69, 70.

[9] Ibid., 69.

[10] Ibid., 69.

[11] Ibid., 70. 

[12] Maria Härkäpää, "Selected Biographies of Marimekko Designers," from Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, ed. Marianne Aav (New York: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2003), 303.

[13] Ibid., 303.

[14] Riitta Anttikoski, "Fashion, Individuality and Industry," from Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture, ed. Marianne Aav (New York: The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2003), 109.

[15] Ibid., 109.

[16] Ibid, 107.

[17] Marimekko online, "About Marimekko: Timeline," http://us.marimekko.com/unfold/timeline, (accessed November 28, 2012).