Ritva Koskennurmi-Sivonen

Couture in the Press – English Summary

Introduction: Fashion and Craft in Finland – A Research Project

Fashion and Craft in Finland is a research project in craft science at the University of Helsinki. In this project I use several scholarly approaches to study the creation of unique dresses in postwar Finnish fashion salons. These salons might also be referred to as Finnish couture to highlight their cultural and material connection with French haute couture.

The first publication of the project was a case study entitled Creating a Unique Dress – A Study of Riitta Immonen’s Creations in the Finnish Fashion House Tradition (1998, published in English). I considered the creation of unique couture dresses to be a phenomenon with multiple facets, each offering a different approach. I concentrated on the creation process, products and clients’ experiences of their unique dresses in the context of the career of one Finnish fashion designer, Riitta Immonen. These parts were discussed in reference to three background frameworks: fashion, craft, and (haute) couture that overlaps the first two.

Publicity as such is essential for the couture concept, both in its French form and in its Finnish counterpart. Collections have been shown not only to buying clientele, but also to the press.

The parentheses in the figure above imply that I recognized publicity as an inherent part of couture but due to its extensiveness the analysis of complete press data was not included in the first publication.

This second study of the project, Couture in the Press (published in Finnish Salonkimuoti lehdistössä), focuses on the Publicity facet, the media representation of couture, over a forty-year period (1945–1985) in Finland.

Craft, fashion, and their overlap, (haute) couture, continue to be the background frameworks of this study. I have added the fourth framework, media, including themes relevant to fashion in the press: Chapter 2) Press and Fashion–Creators and Reflectors of Reality; Chapter 3) Written Fashion; Chapter 4) Drawn Fashion; and Chapter 5) Photographed Fashion.

Aim, data and analysis

The aim is thus to describe, define, and understand the studied phenomenon, i.e. the publicity of couture.

In this part of the research project, Couture in the Press, I studied fashion only in its written and image codes (Barthes 1983). The body of media data consists of written and illustrated editorials and news in the press (140 pieces of text and 290 pictures) from Finnish newspapers and magazines for the years 1945–1985. The selection criterion was that the texts and pictures included creations of one designer, Riitta Immonen, who presented collections regularly, although other designers’ creations may also have been discussed in some of the texts.

The image analysis is based on Naomi Rosenblum’s (1984) five elements of a fashion photograph: model, garment, posture, gesture, and decor. In some cases, it is advantageous to complement these elements with expression. According to Merja Salo (2001), posture, gesture, and expression may be subsumed under the concept of posing. Furthermore, the analysis of some pictures benefit from Goffman’s (1976) concepts of pose (just pose) vs. imposture (to play a role).

Discourse analysis entails a presumption that texts not only reflect but also take part in constructing social reality. The type of discourse analysis that I use is concerned with how language is used in accounts (i. e. news, articles, and captions) rather than deep meanings underlying these texts. (Jokinen, Juhila, & Suoninen 1993; Juhila, & Suoninen 1999.) In this type of ”surface model,” language becomes the object of investigation in its own right, not as a signifier of underlying structure (cf. Tseëlon 2001).

The great national projects – fashion and charity

In the latter half of the 1940s and at the beginning of the 1950s, the press was the organ of ”the great national projects”–Finnish fashion and charity work. Fashion shows were linked with raising money for charity organizations. It was a fruitful symbiosis for both, and this theme prevailed in fashion writing of the time.

The earliest years of the period studied were overshadowed by rationing and the limited import of materials. The press joined in making the innovative use of domestic materials and national style eligible for fashionable use. The discourse was seasoned with some national ideology of ”Finnishness”in dress.

In the context of couture, the combination of Paris influence and the ”homemade” became especially challenging after the launch of Dior’s New Look. French haute couture houses also arranged tours and fashion shows in Finland, which gave the press and fashion audience a yardstick for comparison.

While fashion texts generally described rather than critiqued collections, some texts had features of art critique. For example, the discourse of the ”genuine”is interesting. This question reflects the ambivalence between what echoed the French conception of the fashionable and what was regarded as becoming of and acceptable to a Finnish woman in general, and especially what was in harmony with domestic materials for clothing amidst rationing. The ”genuine” coupled itself with the ideology and pride of being Finnish.

Unlike in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, in Finland a national fashion never developed with recognizable forms that would be descendants of local, folkloristic tradition, living on in everyday life. The development and use of reconstructed national costumes was distinct from fashionable dress as discussed here.

From 1944 to 1951 Muotikuva (Fashion Image) was an important fashion quarterly, representing international glamour as well as Finnish couture.

Finnish couture as European fashion

For circa one decade from the early 1950s to 1962, fashion texts focused on couture per se. Although fashion shows were, still in the fifties, often coupled with charity organizations, fashion also achieved an independent status in the discourse. Couture dresses were described as an aesthetic and practical phenomenon that needed no special ideology to legitimate them. Finnish couture was seen as part of European fashion with which it shared materials and general lines, although they were designed for the Finnish clientele. The fact that a business newspaper Kauppalehti was among the newspapers that reported fashion collections until the early 1960s reveals that couture was considered to be a serious business, while fashion in daily newspapers was usually reported on pages targeted for women and the home.

To a large extent, women’s magazines had the role of a fashion magazine. They presented fashion spreads filled mainly with photographs of the creations of one or more fashion houses, occasional drawings (title page and cover of this volume), and brief texts such as captions. In contrast, newspaper reports continued to consist mainly of text that was occasionally accompanied by a photograph or drawing. Of all Finnish women’s magazines Eeva presented couture most extensively. Even in Eeva there was a gap in the publicity of Atelier Riitta Immonen in the mid-1960s. However, the twenty-fifth anniversary collection of the Atelier in November 1967 received the largest media coverage ever.

During this gap couture creations were visible only occasionally, for example on covers of women’s magazines.

When several newspapers and magazines reported the same collections, it is possible to see how the press realized the principle of collective selection, as described by Blumer (1969) among the buyers.

Omin käsin, a special organ of couture

Among all the magazines, the craft magazine Omin käsin held a special position. It was neither a fashion magazine nor a fashionable magazine. However, it was the most ardent advocate of couture, since it was the organ of all textile work made by hand. Thus it offers a partial but simultaneously profound view not only of fashion, but also of the methods of making the actual artifacts.

From couture to boutique

A quiet life in the public eye in the mid 1960s revealed that media was losing its interest in couture at the expense of the growing fashion industry. The culmination point was at the beginning of 1968, when the fashion editor of the country’s main newspaper Helsingin Sanomat expressed her policy. It was not targeted at Finnish couture but was received as such by Finnish couturiers. This incident coincided with the opening of Riitta Immonen’s boutique. However, as years went by, the same influential writer, Anna-Liisa Ahtiluoto (Wiikeri) defended individuality in boutique collections and the remains of couture, and so did other writers, too.

Outside collections

The publicity of couture was never limited to reporting collections alone. Worn by celebrities and women in central roles in cultural, social, and political life, couture has been visible in an occasional manner. Most often their dresses were not discussed in this type of coverage; sometimes the designer was mentioned. This was valuable publicity for a designer who never advertised her couture creations.

Fashion in texts, photographs, and drawings

Outside designers’ workrooms, the creation of fashion is continued in the media by journalists, fashion illustrators and photographers, who take part in the symbolic production of fashion (Bourdieu 1993). This is true about Finnish couture coverage, too. However, this study does not support Barthes’ (1983) argument that the press puts excessive words between a garment and a consumer to obscure her calculation. Neither the texts nor the pictorial representations aimed at mystifying fashion. They participated in the fashion process by communicating the ideas presented and describing them in a straightforward manner.

Even the ideological advocates of the virtues of national fashion did not connect this fashion with nature mysticism, as was done in the context of Finnish design, which achieved international success in the postwar years (Kalha 1997). When compared with Rocamora’s (2001) findings from the French and British fashion texts, Finnish texts seem to share features from both. Some texts, especially those of the nationalist period, include a little of an art critic’s style, resembling the French manner of regarding fashion as high culture. However, most of the texts which underwent investigation are closer to the down-to-earth nature of the British description of fashion.

Throughout the decades studied, fashion photography conveyed the dignity and discretion of couture. Photographs were taken with a pose which allowed the dress to be in the focus of the picture. Likewise, the chosen environments gave little or no possibilities for interpretations of symbolic meanings or presumed roles played. The models posed for fashion per se, whereby the image-creating function of the late and post-1960s fashion photography, which consciously worked towards alienating the viewer from the dress itself, rarely became an issue where Finnish couture was concerned.

Fashion drawings were especially used in the 1950s to single out a line and details. Technically, drawings looked more elegant in newspapers as the quality of paper was not well suited for photographs. Both the texts and illustrations harmonized well with a certain matter-of-factness in Finnish couture, in which novelty and creativity could not be described as an annual potlatch.

The decline of international and Finnish couture in the 1960s is evident in fashion texts. However, the decline did not result in the complete loss of interest in couture and this designer. During the publicity gap of the 1960s, the press was more interested in her ready-to-wear collections for another company, Cinderella. Then the focus shifted to the designer herself and her own boutique line, and remained so throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The extensive publicity that the publication Creating a Unique Dress received at the end of 1998 and in early 1999 revealed that there is continuous interest in the work and personality of couturière Riitta Immonen, a reborn interest in individuality in dress, and probably also the fact that the timing was favorable for the research in this formerly unexplored field of fashion and craft.

Ritva Koskennurmi-Sivonen

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