Marimekko Design: Prints, Modernity and Finnish Everyday Culture

Walk into a Finnish home and there is a fair chance that a bold printed fabric is somewhere in view: a curtain, a cushion, an apron, a tablecloth at the summer cottage. Marimekko design put those prints there. Over seven decades a small Helsinki company turned large, painterly patterns on plain cotton into part of everyday Finnish life, and into one of the clearest expressions of post-war Finnish modernity. On our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour of Denmark, Sweden and Finland, on day 18, in Helsinki, the group visits the Marimekko flagship store, a few minutes down the road from the Artek showroom. This article looks at where the prints came from, who drew them and why they still matter.

From an oilcloth works to a design company

Marimekko grew out of a small Helsinki firm called Printex. According to the Bard Graduate Center in New York, which has exhibited the company’s work, Viljo Ratia acquired Printex in 1949, when it mainly made oilcloth, and expanded it into textile printing. His wife, Armi Ratia (1912–1979), became its art director, and it was she who set its artistic direction. Rather than copying the conventional patterns of the day, she brought in young artists and asked them for something new.

In 1951 Armi and Viljo Ratia founded Marimekko to show what those printed cottons could become. The name ends in mekko, the Finnish word for a dress, and the first idea was simple: make clothes from the fabrics so that people could see the prints in use rather than on the bolt. Armi Ratia led the company until her death in 1979, and the Bard Graduate Center describes her as its art director and the author of its wider lifestyle concept.

Marimekko describes itself as a Finnish lifestyle design company known for its original prints and colours, and its own account of its founding is direct: when it began in 1951, its printed fabrics gave it a strong and unique identity. Everything else, from clothing to tableware, has been built on that foundation.

Scale, colour and the hand: what made the prints new

Finland in the early 1950s was a country rebuilding after war, and a single bold pattern on plain cotton could change a whole room or a simple dress. Marimekko’s prints were not decoration added to a finished object. The pattern was the design, and the cut of the clothes or the plain hang of a curtain existed to show it off.

Scale was the first difference. Where many prints of the time repeated small motifs across the cloth, Marimekko’s designers worked large, so that one repeat of a pattern could fill a window or the front of a dress. Colour was the second: strong, flat and confident, chosen to read from across a room. The third was the hand. Many of the designs began as paintings, and the brushwork and uneven edges survived into the printed cloth, giving even an abstract pattern a human quality.

Armi Ratia had firm views about what did not belong. Marimekko’s own account of the period records that she loved flowers in life, keeping fresh-cut flowers in the company’s premises, but believed they simply did not work in Marimekko’s design: she rejected the small, conservative floral prints of the era and thought it futile to try to capture wild flowers on fabric. That stance shaped the early collections, which leaned towards abstraction, stripes and geometry.

Clothing followed the same thinking. Vuokko Nurmesniemi, trained as a ceramic artist, joined the company in the early 1950s. The Bard Graduate Center credits her with the Piccolo brushstroke-stripe pattern of 1953 and the Jokapoika (Everyboy) shirt of 1956, which it listed in 2003 as still among Marimekko’s bestselling products. Simple cuts of this kind let the printed fabric hang freely and carry the design.

Maija Isola and the art of pattern

The designer whose name is bound up with Marimekko’s prints is Maija Isola (1927–2001). Born in Riihimäki, she studied from 1946 to 1949 at the Ateneum in Helsinki, which then housed the city’s school of art and design, and it was there, according to Marimekko, that Armi Ratia first discovered her talent. She joined Printex as she graduated, and over a career of 38 years with the company she created more than 500 designs.

Isola was a painter as well as a textile designer, and her prints show it. Her patterns often work at a scale that seems closer to a mural than a dress fabric. The Bard Graduate Center notes that her interior textiles were known for oversized geometric patterns and bright colours.

In 1964 Isola reversed the company’s own rule when she painted Unikko, a large, simplified poppy, and Marimekko’s account notes that Unikko arrived that spring as part of a full collection of floral patterns, despite Ratia’s stance against flowers. In its 2024 anniversary announcement, Marimekko called Unikko its most globally recognised print, and it marked the pattern’s 60th anniversary in 2024 with a light installation on the façade of the Ateneum, the building where Isola had studied.

Where are Marimekko fabrics printed?

Marimekko runs its own textile printing factory in Helsinki, beside its headquarters in the Herttoniemi district east of the centre. The company’s textile laboratory sits on the same site and, by Marimekko’s account, carries out more than 5,000 tests a year on materials for shrinkage, colour fastness and wear. The factory is not part of the tour itinerary, which focuses on the flagship store in the city centre.

From Helsinki to the wider world

Marimekko’s route abroad ran through exhibitions and a few influential admirers. In 1958 the American architect Benjamin Thompson encountered Isola’s work at the World’s Fair in Brussels, according to the Fashion Institute of Technology’s fashion history resource. Thompson had founded Design Research, a shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, devoted to modern design, and from the late 1950s it introduced Marimekko to American customers.

Then came politics. During the 1960 presidential campaign Jacqueline Kennedy bought and wore Marimekko dresses, and the press coverage of her purchase brought the company wide attention in the United States. On 26 December 1960 she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing a dress in the Nasti print, which Marimekko credits to Vuokko Nurmesniemi. For a small Finnish firm, it was publicity that no advertising budget could have bought.

The appeal travelled because the prints carried an idea as well as a look. Marimekko offered modern design that ordinary households could afford and live with, made from simple cotton and meant to be used. The same thread runs through much of Nordic design in the period, from Danish furniture to Swedish glass, and our guide to Scandinavian design across Denmark, Sweden and Finland follows it through all three countries.

Prints in Finnish everyday culture

What makes Marimekko a cultural subject, and not only a commercial one, is how thoroughly its prints have entered daily life in Finland. Marimekko’s range runs from clothing and bags to home textiles and tableware, so its patterns turn up on curtains and cushions, at the kitchen table and at the summer cottage by the lake. A print bought for one home can stay in use for years, and carry the memory of a particular house or a particular summer.

That ordinariness was the point. Much post-war Finnish design set out to make good things for everyday use, and printed cotton was an accessible way to bring colour and modern form into a home. It belongs to the same broad culture of design as the architecture and furniture of Alvar Aalto, whose home and studio our article on Alvar Aalto’s house and the architect’s daily life explores, and as the glass made at Iittala, the subject of our guide to Iittala glass and Finnish material culture.

Finland’s printed fabrics also make an instructive contrast with Swedish textiles. Where Marimekko’s strength lay in the artist’s painted design, the Swedish story centres on weaving, industry and design education in a manufacturing region. Our article on Borås and the reinvention of Swedish textiles covers that side of Nordic cloth, and the tour visits Borås earlier in the journey.

Marimekko design on the Scandinavian Design tour

The tour reaches Helsinki on day seventeen, after an overnight ferry from Stockholm, and spends its last five days in the city. Day eighteen starts with a walk to the city centre for the Artek showroom and the Marimekko flagship store, where the company’s current prints can be seen in use; the questions below cover what the visit involves and how much walking the day takes.

The other Helsinki days fill in the wider picture: a visit to Alvar Aalto House and Studio on day seventeen, and on day nineteen a journey of about an hour and a half to Iittala for a guided tour of the Iittala Design Museum and Glass Factory.

Is the Marimekko visit a talk or a store visit?

It is a store visit. The tour itinerary lists a visit to the Marimekko flagship store on day eighteen, following the talk at Artek, and does not list a separate talk or factory tour at Marimekko. It is a chance to see the prints at full scale and in use, and any purchase is entirely your own choice.

How much walking does the Helsinki design day involve?

The group walks to the city centre for Artek and Marimekko, and walks again to Kiasma in the afternoon. The tour as a whole is graded Level 2 (Moderate), which means being able to carry your own luggage, use stairs and manage three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. If you have questions about the pace, a Tour Specialist can talk them through with you.

Where else in Helsinki can I see Finnish design history?

The tour itinerary suggests the Design Museum as one option for free time in Helsinki; it exhibits Finnish and international design, including industrial design, fashion and graphic design. The Ateneum art museum is the building where Maija Isola studied. Check opening hours and tickets on each museum’s official website before you go, and see our guide to Helsinki for the wider city.

Modern design for ordinary homes

Marimekko’s story is a reminder that modern design does not have to live in a museum. It began with a handful of artists painting at a scale nobody expected, a founder who knew what she did not want, and a belief that ordinary cotton could carry serious design into ordinary homes. For practical matters about travelling in Finland, our answers to common questions about Finland are a useful companion. In Helsinki, at the end of a journey that begins among the chairs of Copenhagen and passes through Sweden’s glassworks and textile towns, those prints are a bright and fitting place to finish.