Emily Bick gets in the mood for a Scandinavian Spring
Think of Scandinavian fashion and the first thing that comes to mind is H & M: fashion at its fastest, where teams of designers knock off catwalk copies at the speed of broadband, rendering them into affordable polyester and shipping them across the globe. There is something grim about any chain of stores like H & M – however well they brand themselves with value-conscious, vaguely socialist Scandinavian rhetoric, they are, like Starbucks, McDonalds, and GAP, a plague that threatens to turn the whole world into the same sprawling high street.
Where does a sense of place fit in to
fashion? Cities have their fashion stereotypes, and people who live them.
Just check out the hordes of cybergoths with plastic ropes for hair
extensions in London’s Camden Market, or stroll past the well-coiffed
matrons walking their lapdogs along Paris’ Rue Faubourg de St. Honore.
However much our high streets resemble one another, local fashion tribes
hold out.
IVANAhelsinki is a boutique label that winks at the idea of localism and
uses it as a selling point. Their website opens with a stark red and white
graphic of a match, and a legend of the company’s origins: ‘In 1938
manufacturer Ivan J. Paolovski arrived by train to Helsinki from Vyborg,
which was under Russian occupation at the time. He founded the Globe’s most
Northern match factory into the dark uninhabited wildwood of Eastern
Helsinki. Ivan’s ideology of ascetic, genuine everyday life gained many
supporters in the form of motivated factory workers. And every other
Saturday they went camping. In his match factory the light of life was
growing and the factory grew into an entire sector of town, Eastern Helsinki
was born. Today IVANAhelsinki is one of the biggest match factories in the
world. By the way, IVANAhelsinki also manufactures clothes.’
The typeface is sans serif and modern with the ink smeared here and there to
suggest old-school clunkiness. So far so good: except that when I spoke to
designer Paola Ivana Suhonen she told me that the match factory doesn’t
exist. It’s a great story, though, and doesn’t it create a more romantic
image than the thought of sweated labour churning out cheap copies of Marc
Jacobs’ latest three-month must-have? Perhaps this is the point.
IVANAhelsinki’s ‘history’ exists to define the brand as a design-oriented
lifestyle, rather than disposable fashion. The IVANAhelsinki factory is
located in Lahti, Finland, and uses highly-skilled seamstresses, who enjoy
healthy working conditions, maternity leave and pension benefits. Many
IVANAhelsinki items are hand-finished – even the prints for the
brightly-patterned knee socks are individually designed in-house.
Suhonen founded the company in 1998, while working as a freelance stylist and lecturing at fashion colleges. The label grew steadily, with full-scale collections produced in Spring/Summer 2003, and international distribution throughout Western Europe and North America. Perhaps the legend and expansion of the label has to do with Suhonen’s stint in Milan in the late 1990s. In Milan, Suhonen worked as a designer for Fiorucci – a brand that is best known for its association with the skintight jeans and cartoon t-shirts of the slicked-back, sleazy disco days when fellow Italian Georgio Moroder’s anthems reigned over the dancefloor. While in Milan, Suhonen also edited the trend pages of Moda magazine, stalking the streets for local exemplars of style.
IVANAhelsinki’s marketing approach reminds
me of France’s A.P.C. label. A.P.C. produce high-end casual clothes that
look like they could have come from the wardrobe department of a Godard
film, but updated for the present. It’s stuff you can wear season after
season, both because of the classic styling and because the clothes are so
well-made that they don’t fall apart. A.P.C.’s marketing strategy is to
insist that this is a byproduct of their ‘Frenchness’ – an idea that is half
serious, half joke, as seen in the bottles of own brand olive oil A.P.C.
sell alongside their clothes as artefacts of their brand of ‘Frenchness’ and
stylish living.
IVANAhelsinki uses a similar strategy, particularly with its Spring/Summer
collections, but plays with the idea of the outdoorsy Scandinavian who loves
camping. Camping is seen as a way to forge relationships with family and
friends in a setting outside of work – communal relationships on a small
scale. The label’s idealistic design values and working practices create an
aesthetic which combines the mid-1970s warmth of Lukas Moodyson’s film
Tillsammans (2000) with an unexpected Slavic use of baroque flourishes.
IVANAhelsinki’s Autumn/Winter 2003/04 promotional photographs mix these
ideas in a fashion reminiscent of one of those Wallpaper* spreads that
situate mid-century Danish furniture in a Krakow government office building.
Models lounge in front of cases in a museum that could be anywhere in
Europe; the women’s hair is twisted into odd chignons that Ivana Trump would
be proud of. But, unlike any Wallpaper* spread, IVANAhelsinki’s models seem
approachable, even playful.
Each season’s collection of swirling chiffon dresses, chunky hand-knitted sweaters and immaculately cut flat-front twill shorts is accompanied by a set of simple ‘camp’ basics: twill shorts, cap-sleeved t-shirts, and totebags emblazoned with sharp graphics of matches and tents. The colours are bright Lego primaries while the graphics suggest Soviet Constructivism.
But ignoring the concept for one moment, IVANAhelsinki clothes are gorgeous, flattering, and easy to wear. Suhonen, born in 1974, called upon her memories of the clothes she saw growing up as well as the nostalgic but twisted mixtures of designer and secondhand garments she singled out on the streets. The nostalgia is mixed with an element of personal affection: the ‘1938’ of the fabricated match factory story is the year Suhonen’s mother was born, and the match company’s fictional founder, Ivan Paolovski, is a scrambled masculinisation of Suhonen’s first names, Paola and Ivana. Most IVANAhelsinki clothes have a 1970s cut with a modern colour palette and manic layering of prints. The combination of classic styling and youthful detail suggest a collusion between Marimekko, Diane von Furstenberg, and Bernhard Wilhelm to produce everyday wear for a group of hip backpackers who can afford to stay at nice hotels when they get sick of their tents, but are more interested in hanging out together than showing off their clothes.
The family history embedded in the match story and the idea of Helsinki as some neutral zone where Scandinavian and Slavic influences mix freely is a sort of tour guide to IVANAhelsinki-land. Like most of fashion’s ideas of place, IVANAhelsinki-land doesn’t really exist, except in fantasy, and in yellowed photo albums from the 1970s. Still, it’s a good enough analogy for what happens when a clever designer creates a national costume for the country of her personal memory, and does it so well that we all want to visit and take home souvenirs.
Emily Bick is contemporary’s fashion editor