From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
What's a Gesamtkunstwerk?
The Finnish start to the comfortable modern lifestyle.
NEW YORK--Before Ralph Lauren invented his monogrammed fantasy WASP-world, before Pottery Barn and the J. Crew catalog invited us into their imaginary weekend houses (where the sheets are as impeccable as the houseguests' bone structure), a tiny Finnish design company was on its way to becoming a dispenser not just of clothing and housewares, but of a comprehensive lifestyle. That utopian way of living, earthy yet elite, is now on view at "Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture," at the Bard Graduate Center on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
There was austerity and rationing in postwar Finland; but in 1951, the designer Armi Ratia correctly guessed that Scandinavians, like everyone else, wanted to be less frumpy--and to consume products that reflected an upbeat, modernist outlook, changing gender roles and relaxing class structures. She set out to expand her husband's small printing business into a Gesamtkunstwerk (German for "total work of art"), making textiles and products that reflected the avant-garde attitude then being explored in Finnish plastics, ceramics, furniture and architecture.
It's hard to believe that Marimekko's unmistakably vivid prints, inspired by advertising, modern art and the warp and woof of the global village, were once considered radical. But the idea, in Marimekko's early years, of hostesses greeting guests in airy cotton housedresses, commune-style work clothes or Asiatic pajamas was new. The unisex jackets and geological prints, the groovy names--"life's thread," "joyous smock"--that the designers assigned to their creations, were all a breath of unsullied Nordic air. (Indeed, Marimekko literally translates as "Mary's Dress," which has many connotations but seems to suggest a sort of country girl simplicity and return to nature.)
Some of these new ideas had longevity. The forgiving shapes (connoting sexual equality), as well as the accessibility of the designs, were a firm farewell to the constricting, ladylike silhouettes of the 1950s. Today, women's clothes at Gap or Banana Republic are often interchangeable with the men's, and rhythmic prints, bright stripes and rugged weaves find their ways into fancy and everyday clothes alike. Like the early Marimekko marketers, catalog companies now regularly use pseudo-wholesome text to sell clothes (no sweater is ever green anymore--it's always "celery" or "rain forest" or "seaweed").
Some of the early Marimekko clothing designs are dated, and will remind baby-boomers of the short, triangular shifts that women wore to "swinging" cocktail parties in the 1960s, or to brunch--when brunch was something "young people" did. But the Marimekko look and the lifestyle shift it represented helped to establish what is now the aesthetic default option--comfortable, contemporary casual.
Some of the clothes went too far and suffered from the preciousness of "wearable art." They seem inspired more by abstract paintings than by the female form, so that they might better have been hung at MoMA than cinched around waists and draped over hips. But Marimekko was anointed as glamorous when Jacqueline Kennedy purchased a closetful--and appeared with tousled hair, wearing a pink Marimekko shift, on a magazine cover in 1960.
The unfussy lifestyle promoted by the women behind Marimekko--the company has often relied on female designers--has since been so fully absorbed into contemporary fashion and design that many Marimekko examples from the 1950s and '60s look as if they could be on sale today in SoHo, or in any American mall for that matter. Anna Sui owes something to those baby-doll frocks. Hanna Andersson's striped long johns seem derived from Marimekko sleepwear.
The elegant lines of the plastic housewares, the Nehru jackets, striped T-shirts, utilitarian shoulder bags, "ethnic" prints and cuts, wrap skirts and hooded jackets are now commonplace--no longer design statements but everyday basics. Yet Marimekko fabrics--unapologetic, whimsical, almost childlike--and the company's idealism seem to reflect a lost era.
The faded magazine pages on display at the Bard Center lack the jaded poses and airbrushed artifice of today's fashion spreads. The models were more outdoorsy and sensible, the clothing worn almost sexlessly. The sweet optimism was boundless.
In the late 1950s, American consumers were introduced to Marimekko home products through the Design Research chain, where shoppers could stroll through the kinds of total home environments now mass-produced season after season by companies like Crate & Barrel. Extending the notion of life as an artwork, Marimekko executives dispensed corporate hospitality from a traditional country house--a kind of Finnish precursor to the Connecticut showplace/laboratory where Martha Stewart created her hospitable universe. Marimekko even had plans, eventually scrapped, for a modernist village that would showcase its design and lifestyle philosophy.
After visiting the Bard exhibit, those wishing to live that philosophy (which thrives in retail form) can visit Marimekko's New York boutique, across Central Park on the Upper East Side. There, some of the color has faded to neutral tones and the shapes have become more conventional. Utopian ideals have faded a bit, too, since Marimekko's founding, but the imperatives of shopping persist.
