Meet the Up-and-Coming Label That’s Redefining Parisian Fashion
Photography by Cyrille George Jerusalmi for Yahoo Style
Each city on the fashion calendar more or less has a distinct personality, and Paris has always been the city of fashion, where established designers used to move in hopes of solidifying their careers. It was not a city for the youth or for the experimental. That, of course, has changed in the past few years.
One of the labels that has broken through to truly create a new wave of fashion is Aalto, the barely two-year-old label headed by Finnish designer Tuomas Merikoski. Merikoski had been doing the rounds in Paris for 15 years, working at places like Louis Vuitton and Givenchy before realizing there was something missing.
“For six years I have had this thought in my mind that coming from Finland, and coming from the north, is an area that has not been explored in fashion,” Merikoski tells me over the phone from Paris days before his show. And what Merikoski is exploring isn’t the Finland of Tove Jansson’s Moomins, not the cookie-cutter tourist light of the Scandinavian country, but more of the real experience of growing up in a quasi-isolated country where the sun doesn’t rise or set for many days. What drives and inspires Merikoski is his time as a teen growing up Finland.
“The youth culture in Finland is very free,” he explains. “We were very free, very young [running around] without the supervision of parents. It’s faith, country, the absence of a big city.”
“I always go back to the idea of my youth, the contrasts, the freedom, the diversity,” he adds.
What this translates into is clothes that are luxurious, but with an ineffable ease. Loose trousers worn with marching jackets for a relaxed, modern take on the suit, unusual color combinations like bubblegum pink and mustard, layers upon layers of colors, of clothes, with graphic details that often come from collaborations with Finnish artists. They are genderless, not in a way that is trying to attach itself to the current gender conversation, but in that natural way that teens dress in certain subcultures, particularly those that sprung from music scenes in the ’90s. It’s all whatever you want it to be. It’s no coincidence that music was Merikoski’s first foray into fashion.
“I lived in Finland until I was 21, and when I was living there I wasn’t very interested in fashion. I was into the music and DJ culture of the ’80s and ’90s, hip-hop, trip-hop, and that kind of got me more into the lifestyle,” he remembers. “I finished my high school and thought I would like to start something else, I was very bored. Fashion was a very un-obvious choice — nobody did fashion in Finland at the time, but it was very intriguing. I kind of jumped into something that was very unknown for me and my surroundings.”
Luckily for Merikoski, fashion is currently going through a “youth culture” revival phase, so his instincts about what was lacking in fashion and his desire to branch out on his own perfectly aligned. Last year he was an LVMH prize semifinalist. Now that he has the industry’s attention, his thoughts are, inevitably, in the future. “I’ve been thinking about what the future could be, about the environment. Nature is super important and present in Finland, but at the same time everyone is living in more urban spaces. I think it is that appreciation and acceptance of those contrasts [that energizes me], to think more of them like a strange wreck rather than a defect.” A beautiful way to look at the world.
Yahoo Style is live from Fashion Week! Keep it here for your front row view of the best looks and buzziest moments.
