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Ratia (née black ripped jeans Airaksinen) was born in 1912 in Karelia, a province of Finland near to Russia. She studied textile design at the Central School of Applied Arts, Helsinki, graduating in 1935. That year, she married Viljo Ratia, a soldier, and opened her own weaving workshop soon afterwards in Viipuri, then capital of Karelia. As a student, she was hugely influenced by avant-garde German design school the Bauhaus, a life-long passion evidenced by the presence of a photo of its founder Walter Gropius in her office. As US design critic Jane Holtz Kay noted in a story on Marimekko in The Boston Globe in 1974: "There behind the broad desk and cascading daisies in a glass bowl. Beneath the photo of Gropius, she sits. The indomitable woman who created what must be the world's largest source of design excellence in cloth, personifies a lifestyle at once casual and total."

Resettling in Helsinki, Ratia worked balmain jeans as a copywriter for an ad agency, presaging her flair for publicity. "After the war, young men and women wanted to rebuild Finland," says Borrelli-Persson. "Armi was free-spirited, and rejected notions of class and traditional gender roles." On leaving the military, Viljo bought an oilcloth factory called Printex, which went buckle jeans bankrupt soon after. Armi joined the company in 1949 and two years later she and Viljo co-founded textiles firm Marimekko. It was launched with a fashion show at Helsinki's Kalastajatorppa Hotel. Meaning "Mary's dress" in Finnish, the name Marimekko had a universal ring to it.

Forced to pay reparations to Russia, the country was desperately short of resources, and Marimekko's use of low-cost, utilitarian cotton reflected this. In 1953, Ratia hired young designer Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi, who created the charmingly hand-drawn, pinstripe-like Piccolo print. This found its way onto the Jokapoika shirt the brand's first men's garment, based on Finnish farmers' flare jeans shirts, but soon co-opted by women and loose-fitting dresses also designed by Eskolin-Nurmesniemi. These offered an appealingly comfortable alternative to the restrictive, wasp-waisted silhouette of the 1950s.

Accordingly, Ratia and Eskolin-Nurmesniemi arrived in Cambridge with cardboard boxes filled with dresses and fabrics. The Marimekko frocks referred to at the time as liberating both body and mind proved a hit with students at Radcliffe College, the former Harvard University all-women's college. "Hundreds of Radcliffe girls took the dresses home to their mothers," reported fashion editor Eugenia Sheppard at the time. She also described the label as "a uniform for intellectuals", adding that "Marimekko is for women whose way of wearing clothes is to forget what they have on".

Marimekko s progressive values and creative verve were vividly captured in US photographer Tony Vaccaro's images for a story about the company published by Life magazine in 1964.In one image, shot at Bökars, bolts of 144cm-wide fabric hang like banners from the house's first-floor windows. These showcase such outlandishly large-scale prints as Melooni (Finnish for melon) with its concentric oval motifs and Sikkikuikka (Great-crested grebe) featuring blown-up brushstrokes tracing wildly oscillating waves and chevrons in searing yellows, pinks and blues. These ripped jeans for men were designed by Maija Isola, who was a 22-year-old student when Ratia employed her. She went on to become the brand's principal designer, producing more than 500 designs until her retirement in 1987.

Marimekko was mainly staffed by women, as the same image conveys: mostly female employees, sporting equally vibrant, boxy dresses, mill around on the driveway. The mansion's front doors are wide open, suggestive of Ratia's hospitality and receptive personality. "Armi loved bringing people from different parts of society together," says Kemell-Kutvonen. Her parties at Bökars, where a diverse guestlist [img]https://www.argo-holidays.com/images/a/ripped jeans for men-913zgr.jpg[/img] feasted on crayfish and white wine, "were legendary", she adds.