For this spring and summer the Finnish textile company Marimekko has created a new contemporary dimension to the print, called Marimekko Kioski, it is a curated collection of gender-neutral street-wear.
Marimekko was founded by the late Armi Ratia in 1951. It is best known for a giant sized asymmetrical poppy design, Unikko- which means Poppy in Finnish. The design was created in in 1964 at a time, when the company’s collections featured mostly abstract prints. Designer Maija Isola wanted to create something interesting from this organic theme and designed an entire range of floral prints. Today, the iconic flower represents creativity.
The collection encapsulates Marimekko‘s values of creative courage and the act of living, not pretending, by presenting its most iconic prints in a range of wearable staples.
In Marimekko’s creative community, doing things together has always been key to innovation and originality. The iconic patterns have been reborn and reworked time and time again in thousands of imaginative color palettes. The Kioski collection was initially created to introduce Marimekko’s Unikko to a new, urban crowd and younger market.
For their Spring/Summer collection Marimekko collaborated with some of its favourite members of the vibrant Helsinki community of young doers and makers, and created a campaign celebrating creativity together with them.
’’For this new edition, we really wanted to celebrate the creative youth around us. The collection pieces are worn by some of the early adapters of what we’ve come to call Helsinki’s ‘Unikko streetwear phenomenon‘.’’ says Marimekko’s ready-to-wear head designer Satu Maaranen.
Although Armi Ratia died in 1979 her company is still embracing her ideas. She was a trailblazer who made Marimekko a way of life, an attitude, a phenomenon embracing the everyday and the extraordinary.
As part of its ambitious sustainability agenda, one of the key objectives of Marimekko is to continuously increase the share of sustainable cotton and more sustainable materials in its products and packaging. With this in mind that have started using the new material Spinnova. It is a wood based fiber that contains no harmful chemicals. This method of production puts considerably less strain on the environment than, for example, viscose or cotton. The manufacture of Spinnova fiber consumes 99% less water than cotton production.
The company produces both fashion and home wares collections. I think they are fabulous I hope you do too.
creativecolour.org 