Unikko, 1964

Maija Isola, Unikko fabric, 1964. Marimekko.

In 1964, Armi Ratia declared that Marimekko would not produce floral prints. Her reasoning was that flowers were so beautiful that she believed no printed pattern could represent them adequately. Her view had logic behind it, with Marimekko’s prints up to that point working by reducing a subject to its essential graphic form. Ratia appears to have believed that flowers resisted this process.

Maija Isola disagreed, and designed a series of bold botanical prints in direct response to Ratia’s ban. Unikko, a poppy rendered at enormous scale and reduced to its essential elements, was one of them. The design consists of loose asymmetrical clusters of petals in saturated pink and red on white, with contrasting stems and centres.

Isola had been the company’s primary designer for fifteen years, and even Ratia had to admit that the print was obviously good. Unikko was put into production, and with Ratia conceding to liking them, florals have been included in every Marimekko collection since. Unikko itself has been in continuous production since 1964, and has been printed in more than one hundred colourways.

The story of Unikko’s creation gives us a great insight into how production in this era of Marimekko worked, demonstrating how Armi Ratia would set the conditions and the designers would work within, or in this case, against them. This collaborative approach produces something that no individuals involved would have produced independently. Isola designed Unikko purely because she was told she couldn’t.

The full piece on Marimekko 1951-1968, Armi Ratia, the early designers, and the prints that made a company into a movement, is available to read on Smooth Decorator.