Marimekko’s new custodian

Marimekko’s forthright new creative director is determined to take the iconic Nordic brand into the future by marrying its commercial success with artistic integrity.

Marimekko’s creative director Rebekka Bay. Picture: Jan Søndergaard

This story starts in the early 1970s when a trendy young mother-to-be buys a pink and red Marimekko dress in a graphic fish-scale pattern called Suomu. She wasn’t going to let pregnancy cramp her style, and Marimekko dresses were designed for freedom of movement and comfort as well as being in capital-F fashion. This one came from Form & Farve, the place to go for the latest groovy yet functional design in Copenhagen. But the setting could just as easily have been Marimekko’s home base of Helsinki, Washington DC, Tokyo, or any state capital in Australia where women embraced the basic but revolutionary A-line frock.

As it turned out, the young mother kept the dress and some 50 years later the memory came flooding back when she saw an exhibition that Marimekko staged during Copenhagen Fashion Week in February to launch its Autumn Winter 2022 collection. It features only archival prints from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the golden era of the Finnish design brand famed for its vibrant colours and joyful patterns. Prints with names such as Pannukakkua ja mansikkahilloa (Pancakes and Strawberry Jam) from 1964 were teleported into 2022 by upscaling the pattern and refreshing the palette.

Called New Folk – New Traditions, it was the fourth collection by creative director Rebekka Bay. Instead of presenting the clothes via a runway show, Bay commissioned the Danish artist Trine Søndergaard to create a photographic series around the fabrics. This work was used for a more conceptual digital launch of the collection and an exhibition.

On opening night, the Danish model and influencer Caroline Bille Brahe wore a Hugrun sleeveless wrap dress layered over a stripy Birta shirt and pants, duly posting shots of herself to the legions of followers who admire her casual urban style. Two days later when the exhibition was open to the public, a sprightly Danish woman, having seen the Suomu print in Søndergaard’s photographs, went straight to the racks of new season clothes and pulled out a dress in black and beige Suomu. “I have a dress that I bought 50 years ago in the same print in pink and red,” she said with some excitement. “I had forgotten it, but when I saw it in the photo, I thought I must get it out again.”

The stories of the model and the mother – sponsored from one and unsolicited from the other – might be 50 years apart but they exemplify the balancing act Bay faces in her mission to renew Marimekko. A brand that critics say became so commercial it watered down its heritage and thus, potential. A brand admired outside Scandinavia for its Nordic otherness and so entrenched in the Finnish culture and modern identity that Finns behave as if they own it. Given they represent half of all net sales, they can certainly dictate its fate.

Marimekko’s creative director Rebekka Bay adjusting a garment

“When you walk the streets of Helsinki, you will see every second woman carrying a Marimekko bag and a tote and wearing a Marimekko top,” says Bay, who knows she has to tread warily as she ushers in a new era. Taking it back to the past to reset for the future.

“I am more willing to challenge the legacy. I have a tonne of respect for Marimekko, for the archive; I really don’t want to mess it up but I want to challenge what it is.”

Before she took on her role in September 2020, Bay was on the board for three years, where she worked with the design team to commercialise the collection. In that period Marimekko was without a creative director, a vacuum that was filled by marketing-led initiatives. “It’s fine but not creative – lacking content,” Bay says. “What I saw when I then stepped in full-time was like, OK we have done a great job commercialising the brand but in doing so we have totally forgotten who we are. We are not leading by the arts anymore, by the dress being the canvas for great prints or great patterns. It’s a super difficult balance: how do you create strong content and at the same time translate that into something commercially viable?”

The commercial success was evident in 2021 results, the best in Marimekko’s history. The risk for Bay is that her attempts to give Marimekko more cultural and artistic credibility may alienate the loyal customer. This was tested in February when her first collection, Pre-Spring 22, went on sale. While fashion commentary was favourable, some customers asked whether it was still catering to them. “Any good for D-cup or more? Hard to tell as models are typically flat-chested,” wrote one Finn on Instagram.

“I have not proposed to walk away from our legacy but really to dive in and celebrate it,” says Bay. “A lot of my time is spent ensuring that we create something that continues to push us forward or challenge the perception of the brand and then ensure that is trickling down to what we do. My ideal scenario is to create something of high artistic value because I believe that relevance is created through art and culture but we always turn that into commercial products.”

Bay, 52, is not the first non-Finn to lead the creative side of Marimekko but she is the first with such an international pedigree. Born and raised in Silkeborg, a small city known as Denmark’s outdoor capital, on the Jutland peninsula, she is as much a product of the 20-plus years she spent outside the country as in. After graduating from Design School Kolding, she moved to London in 1997 with husband Ricky Nordson, where she worked as a trend forecaster. From there she was recruited by H&M to conceptualise and found its minimalist brand Cos, a role she held for five years. In 2012, she became creative director for the struggling Gap in New York, and then head of design and product for start-up Everlane. That role was short-lived, and in the interregnum, she joined the board of Marimekko.

Then in May 2017 she became creative director for Uniqlo Global Innovation Centre, splitting her time between New York and Tokyo. Bay says working for a Japanese company out of New York should be calculated in cat years, “because it’s really hard work”. When Covid struck early in 2020 and she was locked down and working in two time zones from her loft, she called time. “I have had it with that kind of working,” she says.

Bay and Nordson, a design agent, decided to return to Copenhagen with their teenage son Viktor and take their chances. They bought a classic 256sq m apartment via FaceTime and headed “home”.

From Marimekko's new collection

Bay exudes so much confidence and drive that an interviewer for Danish fashion magazine Eurowoman suggested. “I don’t think Rebekka Bay ever needed trainer wheels on her bike.”

“My husband loved that,” says Bay. Did she have trainer wheels back in Silkeborg? “I’m sure I did.”

She says post Uniqlo she wanted to recalibrate, not work less but work with more freedom and flexibility and “more ownership over what I do.” She wasn’t going to find that job by the normal means and besides she’d never actually applied for a job, they have come to her. So she updated her LinkedIn profile and asked a few former colleagues to write “a few nice words”. Gert Jonkers, co-founder of Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman, who launched Cos magazine with Bay, wrote: “Rebekka was always inspiring, decisive and convincing, and fun to work with – a magic combination.”

When she approached Marimekko’s president and CEO Tiina Alahuhta-Kasko for a reference, she got a job offer instead. “Tiina was like, are you looking for a new job? Then I don’t want you to look, I just want us to figure out how we do this.” They did. Within a couple of weeks of landing in Copenhagen, Bay was enunciating her vision for the “joyful, timeless and global lifestyle brand”.

“It’s important to understand I knew what I was walking into,” she says. “When I joined, I had already formulated a strategy in my head, so I came in proposing a new assortment plan, new concepts, new focus areas for the brand. I came in very clear in my vision around creating both a strong commercial layer but also really emphasising the more artistic layer.”

The latter is intrinsic to Marimekko’s heritage, from the beginning fabric designs were treated like art; each was named and the designer credited. But the artistry can get lost when designs are plastered over everything from mugs to pot mitts. Sales are roughly evenly split between ready-to-wear, bags, accessories and home, which runs the gamut from towels to tablecloths, crockery and glass. Bay is responsible for both.

From Marimekko's new collection

“We used to be more potholders and tea towels but we are much more moving into hard surfaces. For instance, we are working on recycled glass for vases. That part of our home collection is growing much faster than our textile collection.”

But Marimekko was, is and will always be about The Dress. The name is a portmanteau of Mari, the eternal woman, and Mekko, a Finnish word for a simple dress. Founder Armi Ratia registered it days after a well-received fashion show in Helsinki in 1951. She had gone into business to help her husband’s struggling textile printing firm Printex, but later became an unlikely style icon for left-leaning intellectuals and international celebrities alike.

“I’m selling a way of life. If you think Marimekko is fashion, you’re lost. Marimekko is freedom from fashion – actually a big laugh at establishmentarianism,” she once said. In 1967 chronicling the rise and rise of Marimekko, the design magazine Mobilia described Ratia as a “dictator” who bewitched her employees, managing to get “400 women and two dozen men to work as a team”. “Wherever the autocratic Marimekko boss travels in the world there must stand a turquoise blue typewriter in her hotel room. And flowers.” Feminist, idiosyncratic and with a predilection for proclamation, when she died in 1979 Ratia she was credited as being “possibly the most important female influence” in contemporary design.

“A woman is sexy, not a dress” was another of Ratia’s aphorisms. By the time Bay came along, as Marimekko was approaching its 70th anniversary, that dress was still the brand’s single most important category but it had become frumpy and no longer true to the ideal. “It’s so funny,” says Bay, whose typical workday uniform is black jeans, Acne ankle boots and a crisp white often-Jil Sander shirt, “but the first thing I did was to try every dress, every style, to figure out forms. What I found was that a lot of the dresses looked big but I still couldn’t move because of the way they were constructed. I really don’t like big breast darts and there was a lot of that because everything had just been graded up to cater for all sizes and the breast darts were huge.”

From Marimekko's new collection

Through that process she identified three archetypes or silhouettes – straight, A-line, and fit and flare – that should always be in the collection in different volumes and lengths. “If we want to be reckoned with in ready-to-wear, we need to understand form,” she says. She also needed to understand how the dress fits the body. “That’s the emotional connection with the brand. They are never tight; they can be relaxed, oversized, they can also be slim but they can never be skinny, restrictive, and they always need pockets.” That research set the blueprint for tidying up the collection, simple things such as raising an armhole to give more movement, creating base patterns and blocks, the founding tenet of Cos, so that someone could buy one dress and everything else would fit the same way. This is crucial for Marimekko’s digital ambitions to create almost a flagship store experience online.

As for the flagship stores, part of a 152-store global retail network, they will come under scrutiny as well. In Copenhagen, Bay has flipped the physical store experience. After the soulless flagship store on the main pedestrian shopping strip was closed, she opened Marimekko Kreative, an experimental space where she can explore arts and culture and test out retail concepts that may work elsewhere. Thus far it has been done with a small budget and short time frame, but it is a striking gallery-style space in a landmark Nordic functionalist building completed in 1958, around which a new creative hub is being formed. Bay has an office there and otherwise commutes to Helsinki every other week.

“I am working on how to take the learnings from Marimekko Kreative and apply them in how we think about our channel or store strategy. I really think that the flagship generally, as we know it today, has lost relevance and physical spaces need to be more experiential.”

Sustainability is the number-one priority, and one of the reasons for aligning with Copenhagen Fashion Week, which has branded itself around sustainable credentials. That takes time and is being done under the umbrella of broader company targets. Bay has launched Marimekko Pre-loved, a pilot concept for selling vintage pieces, and is exploring sustainable textiles such as cupro instead of viscose, mineral and botanic dyes, and using unbleached fabric as the base.

“We are constantly trying to implement more sustainable ways in everything we do. If It sounds vague it is because we are trying to do it 360-degrees. How we design, how we cut; can we eliminate waste, can we upcycle our own waste, can we print differently?” She wants it to be tangible. “In 2023 you will see a lot of products across home and ready-to-wear printed on unbleached cotton or linen. I think there is something in making your actions visible, so that people can see it and feel it.”

Marimekko Kreative, Copenhagen. Picture: Jan Sondergaard

In June, Bay plans to visit Australia for the first time. Marimekko has a big following there dating back to the ’70s when people such as visionary interior designer Marion Best championed the brightly coloured fabrics. “We have very loyal customers there and a very engaged and passionate team in Australia. I can see why Marimekko is working in Australia,” Bay says.

Last year she was a judge on the Magasin du Nord fashion prize, awarded annually to a rising star of Danish fashion. In the lead-up to the award, the finalists are mentored. Bay was paired with Frederik Berner Kühl, a Florence-educated Dane who started his menswear brand in 2019 and was about to take the leap full-time with his first collection. Berner Kühl didn’t win but Bay’s input was so valuable he asked her to join his board. He says she gave him the right balance of support and tough love for his vision for a clean and quiet brand.

“She has this ability to laser cut to the core of what is important,” Kühl says. “The vision people try to create, she can either see right through it or she can see that there is something in it.” His experience echoes that of others in her orbit. Decisive, analytical, frank if not blunt, with a clarity that is essential but often missing on planet fashion.

“That’s what I like about Rebekka, this no-nonsense approach that I think you get if you do what she’s been doing for such a long time. If you work at Gap with 200 designers you have to be like ‘it’s my way or the highway’ because otherwise you won’t be able to do the job. You have to be clear in your communications – that’s one of her great strengths.”

Bay admits her certitude can seem like blindness to what others are thinking. “I even have tunnel vision but I am not very proud, so I find it super easy to forgive, change, move on,” she says.

Eighteen months in, her conviction and vision for Marimekko is unwavering, but she is constantly reflecting and revising. “The first collections are in store and we have already come far. But I am never static in what we do, I am constantly rethinking, creating new tools and new rules.”

The day after the Autumn Winter 22 launch and exhibition. she was questioning whether it was too conceptual or complicated. It probably hadn’t generated a fashion week buzz, which in Copenhagen tends to be more about the vibe on the streets than what’s on the runways, but it was a clear platform for the future, at the artistic periphery of fashion.

A dress from Spring Summer 22, which has just landed in store, says everything about what Bay has achieved so far. Sleeveless A-line cut on the bias, it is made in Unikko, the most popular Marimekko fabric ever, ubiquitous to the point of being a cliché. Who in their right mind would want to wear a dress in the same pattern as a tea cosy?

“It’s an amazing print but unfortunately it has been commercialised to a point where you are thinking, ‘I cannot relate’,” says Bay, who nevertheless has shown it is possible to make Unikko not just relatable but desirable. Through blowing up the scale and printing it in tone-on-tone matt and glossy black, Bay not only refreshed the iconic floral pattern but she created a dress for the ages. The one she promised. “The dress women throughout the world will wear and make their own.”