Marimekko, by Elsa Dorfman, on the Polaroid 20x24

I discovered Marimekko's @ Design Research, then a wooden white house on Brattle St. where now is the bunker style Harvard Graduate School of Education. Everyone in Cambridge was excited by the store. There had never been anything like it. Furniture, accessories, glassware, clothes, all shown together... and lots and lots of plants in masses of color. It was 1964 and brattle street of that time had a small town feel... no brick bldgs to speak of, lots of wooden three story bldgs w/ small retail merchants. There was a 24hr bookstore, three grocery stores, several tiny dress shops, leather sandal makers. A cafeteria. No offices to rush to. Strolling was the operative word. I was twenty-seven.

I don't remember which was my first Marimekko or for what occasion I was inspired to buy it. The dresses were very expensive for me and a big splurge. Until I was 15 I wore handmedowns from my cousins and after that, wore bargains from Filenes Basement that my mother bought for me when they had three price reductions, I had never developed a fashion sense of my own. Unless one calls Haymaker dresses w/ peter pan collars and floral or seersucker fabric a fashion sense. So Marimekko was my breakout apparel.

The funny thing abt my loving Marimekko, beside the obvious extravagance for a freelance Cambridge type, was that my body didn't conform to the ideal Marimekko woman, who, it seemed to me, was tall and lanky, and thin, and narrow through the shoulders and breast. So, in a way, the Marimekko obsession was my going against my type....trying to figure which dresses wd work for me...and which were totally hopeless.

Eventually, I decided what I really had to do was to buy Marimekko fabric and have a seamstress make me dresses out of the material. There was a wonderful Asian seamstress Chico who wd make me dresses and tell me at 145 pounds, that I was her largest client. I cdnt escape the tacit frown...from my Scandinavians or from my asian dressers.

Fast forward decades and though I moved from Cambridge St to Flagg St. to Franklin St., all w/in a mile, but involving lots of shlepping and triage, and the decades involved incremental body changes and childbirth, I brought very few of my marimekkos to good will. I cdnt bear to part w/ them. They are the only clothes I saved in their own trunk. By 1978 they were several sizes too small and it was clear I wasn't going to have a daughter!! Yet...

Caroline Van Valkenburgh and I bonded over our love for Marimekko. Part of our affection for eachother and the clothes came from our nostalgia for Harvard Square of the sixties and seventies. We are both in touch w/ our idealism of our thirties and the conviction that we were going to change the country. The war wd be over and the country wd be better, fairer. Caroline, a filmmaker, is making a movie abt the phenomenon of Marimekko and the people who still have their Marimekkos and who have cherished these dresses and shirts and coats, and yes, bikinis, since the late sixties!!! She is interested in the history of Marimekko, a business started and led by gifted women in Sweden, and brought to Cambridge by Benjamin Thompson, one of the Harvard Square geniuses who flowered at that time.

So, inevitably, as an adjunct to Caroline's project, I have photographed some of her interviewees on my camera, the Polaroid 20x24.