Tell me about what you do at Aalto.
I’m a full-time lecturer in fashion and clothing design. I’ve been in my current role for five years now, but I’ve always had some connection to the university ever since I graduated. I’d come for visits, give talks, assist in some courses while working on other things. I always felt that nice connection to the school and the people who had taught me, and I really enjoyed that.
We’re a really small team – only four full-time teachers in the BA programme – and then some visiting lecturers who just come in to give one course. The full-time staff is small, and so is our intake. We’re a public school and we take in 16 students a year. I teach something to each year, but my biggest responsibility is the teaching and tutoring of the BA thesis collection work. That’s where most of my energy goes. And I’ve also had a big role in organising the annual show of the school, which has been really important for the students and the school as a whole. I’ve been doing that for five years as well.
Did you study the same degree you’re teaching now?
Yes, though it was very different then.
How so?
Back then it was quite separate from the industry, more like an art-school environment. We had life drawing once a week for at least three years, for example. I think it’s a shame that has gone down. It was a bit aloof – more about painting, drawing, making. I personally made a lot of clothes, but it was more on me. Many courses were design courses without making – less practice-led research, less material testing, draping, prototyping. Now we have a lot of that, and we really emphasise learning by doing. Another change is that we no longer separate fashion and textiles. All our BA students learn the basics of garment construction and pattern making, and also use the workshops for printing, dyeing, knitting and weaving. They get the textile basics too.
Have you incorporated any of the business side of fashion into the syllabus?
No, I wouldn’t say that’s our strong point. Especially not in the BA – it’s very hands-on and practice-based. But since we became Aalto University – maybe ten years ago – the MA has become more academic than it used to be.
Because Aalto was created through merging three different universities, right?
Yes. Before that it was a university-level school but with fewer academic requirements. With the merger we officially became Aalto University, and that brought more expectations, especially academically.
Having been a student there and now a teacher, do you think the nature of the students themselves has changed much?
Not really. I still feel many don’t know exactly what they’re getting into. It’s more of a general curiosity – towards clothes, fashion, self-expression through wearing or owning or selecting garments. What’s important when talking about Aalto is that we are far from the industry. In Paris or London you have fashion around you all the time. Here it’s different. It’s almost a three-hour flight to Paris, and Finland doesn’t have much of a fashion industry. So students aren’t motivated by “I want to join the industry,” but more by curiosity and expression. That hasn’t changed much.
What’s the upside of studying fashion so far away from the industry?
People really question what fashion is, what it should be, what it can be. There isn’t a strong framework that says “this is how it works.” Students find their own rules. A lot of our students arrive with fashion as something personally important – a way of finding friends, a crew, people they relate to. It’s tied to their own experiences. We nurture that, and it makes the starting points of their projects very rich and diverse. The downside is access. Even getting an internship requires a lot of work and luck. In Paris or London internships are built into the programme. We can only recommend them and try to help students, usually after BA and before MA. But we can’t require them, because it would be too hard to find places for even 16 people.
There must also be some benefit to not being in such a competitive environment.
Yes, I think so. Here you always enter conversations or events feeling a bit like an outsider. You don’t expect much – so if something happens, you’re happy, and everyone’s happy for you.
Do any of your students start brands locally?
Not really. There are smaller brands or people doing their own projects alongside freelance work, but starting and sustaining a brand from Helsinki is rare. From my students, only one comes to mind who has shops in Paris and Japan. Most find it unrealistic. The market isn’t here – you’d need an international audience from the very beginning.
Is there a future where that could change?
That’s a good question. It’s partly infrastructure, but also the small size of the market. If you do something specific, you need a larger public from the start. Since Covid, people aren’t travelling the same way. At our student showroom in Paris, in the beginning there were more visitors from Milan and London. Now it’s mostly French. So either we go to where people are, or people come here. Online helps, but physical presence is still important. For our students, meeting people and exchanging ideas is essential if they want to run a brand.
What about the other Nordic region? Are students interested in, say, Copenhagen-based brands, or are they more drawn to Paris, London, and the traditional fashion capitals?
When something is close, it feels less exotic. So maybe less enthusiasm here for other Scandinavian brands. But many of our students do internships or get work in those companies. Of course, Swedish and Danish brands are much better at marketing and communication than we are. Some of our students have studied one year in Denmark and then come here. One key thing is that our BA is in Finnish. Legally BA degrees must be taught in the official languages of Finland – Finnish or Swedish. That already limits who can come. We’ve had applicants from Stockholm, but in the end, when they realise all teaching is in Finnish, it doesn’t work. The MA is in English and much more international. Why exactly the law exists I can’t say, but historically it was seen as important.
That’s such a huge difference to schools in London and Paris.
Yes. We actually had a joint project with CSM and IFM where small groups of BA students shared their thesis projects with each other in calls. It was really nice – for students and staff. We compared how different schools do things.
Were there any surprising differences?
What Sarah Mower said in one of those talks was that she expected IFM and CSM students to have more in common, but actually found Aalto’s students closer in approach – more conceptual, less driven by pure fashion research. For me, the big eye-opener was portfolios. At CSM and IFM, portfolios are incredibly strong. We realised ours weren’t on that level. Since then we’ve worked much harder on portfolios, because our students are competing for the same jobs.
Does Finnish culture or the national psyche shape the work of your students?
Maybe I’m too inside it to see clearly. But I don’t think students feel restricted in what they can research or talk about. Often they use very personal stories or experiences as a foundation. Many students come here after not fitting in elsewhere, sometimes with bad school experiences. They might not value their strengths yet. The core is to make everyone feel comfortable and valued. From there, really diverse ideas come out – sometimes very abstract, sometimes very concrete. There’s always openness to what you can express with clothes.
The past five years have been so turbulent for young people everywhere. How has this shaped the student experience at Aalto?
Well, obviously there’s the war in Ukraine – Finland as a neighbouring country to Russia means that even if not directly, in some ways it impacts a lot of things. I had that kind of feeling that you think it’s going to get easier next year, and then there’s always something behind the corner – smaller things here at the uni, or larger societal and political things. It has been quite challenging. I noticed that students were a bit cautious for some time. I think we haven’t really discussed how long-term the effects of Covid and lockdowns actually were. In our everyday lives, teaching goes on as usual. The best part of the job is when students come here who maybe didn’t have such great experiences in school before, or who don’t know how to value their own strengths yet. Since it’s only 16 students, we get to know them really well, very personally. To see them find their own thing and grow a lot in those three years – that’s really the best part. And that happens regardless of what’s going on outside.
So the university becomes more of a refuge when students feel nervous about the future.
Yes, exactly. I suppose that’s it.
Is the small size very intentional at Aalto?
Yes, it is intentional – also because even if there are only 16 people graduating from the programme each year, there aren’t 16 jobs waiting for them here. So most of our students who want to stay in fashion almost automatically need to move outside of Finland and work somewhere else.
So speaking English is essential if they want to work in fashion.
Yes, absolutely. In Finland we’re used to that – if we only know our mother tongue we can communicate with five million people! So we’re motivated to learn other languages, and most students get by just fine.
