Word: ratia
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...sellers since 1956). It is perhaps one of the first ever lifestyle brands (the Courier-type logo, which was inspired by a magazine headline, dates from 1954 and has been stamped on clothing and home wares ever since). The company was started in 1951 by textile designer Armi Ratia, whose husband Viljo owned an oilcloth-printing company that was struggling as a result of postwar shortages. Ratia was determined to set about turning the scarcity of fine fabrics, caused by postwar rationing, into an advantage by hiring designers to create inexpensive screen-printed cottons emboldened with color and exuberant pattern...
...company fueled by female power (and with a staff of more than 90% women), the poppy print was born when the forceful Armi Ratia told Maija Isola that Marimekko wanted nothing to do with the pretty florals that have been a leitmotif of industrially produced furnishing fabrics ever since the advent of William Morris and Liberty of London. The headstrong Isola responded with a flower print that owes nothing to an English country garden. Though today Unikko adorns everything from shower curtains to cookie tins, when it was introduced, the print seemed to channel the rising wave of '60s discontent...
DIED. Armi Ratia, 67, Finnish designer and the dynamo behind Marimekko, the internationally known fabric and fashion house; after a long illness; in Helsinki. In 1949 Ratia quit her advertising job to write a novel and help salvage her husband's threadbare oilcloth company. The novel never was written, but the firm with Ratia as president took shape in 1951 as Marimekko (translation: a little dress for Mary). Ratia's bold-hued, clear-figured prints and the functional clothes she cut from them became Finland's hottest export since the sauna...
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