Diplomatic Wives, Cultures of Dress and Brita Kekkonen

In this article, I discuss the private dress collection of Brita Kekkonen (1927–2013), a diplomatic wife, who was a very well-known figure in Finland during the period of the Cold War. Brita Kekkonen was also a very talented dressmaker and a very fashionable figure in diplomatic circles. Some eighty outfits made by Brita Kekkonen have survived to this day, in addition to her voluminous pattern collection, containing more than 1,000 patterns from several decades. The aim of my new postdoctoral research project is to identify Brita Kekkonen’s dresses and examine their use, politico-cultural meanings and design in the context of the Cold War, diplomatic etiquette and Kekkonen’s own personal history.

Fashions of Snæfellsness

The sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) are an important part of European literary history. Both the sagas’ historical background and their literary techniques were studied intensely in the last century, but dress and fashion in Old Norse–Icelandic literature received comparatively little attention in this period. Moreover, the literary corpus and textile history have rarely been used to illuminate one another; however, as this article will demonstrate, synthesising data and methodological approaches from both fields can yield new knowledge about both historical textiles and the sagas. This article focuses on four of the sagas of Icelanders that are set on the Snæfellsnes peninsula: Bjarnar saga Hítdælakappa, Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss, Eyrbyggja saga, and Víglundar saga. The central question the article poses is, how are social norms and cultural ideas reflected in clothing and textiles in these sagas? This study presents a comprehensive and multifaceted view of the textile and clothing imagery by combining qualitative and quantitative textual analysis showing how the imagery is an integral part of the narrative rather than an embellishment. The article reveals that clothing and textiles serve an array of functions in the sagas which are linked to the societal order. Several themes — such as masculinity, social rank, and the practice of magic — are shown to have a close connection with clothing as well as other textiles.

Behind the Scene

In this article, I analyze teacher’s attire as a political phenomenon in the context of the Mari people, a Finno-Ugric minority living in Central Russia. The material for this study is based on observations and interviews made by the author during 1987‒2019 in different places of the Mari region. The Mari teacher’s dress code, a dark dress with a white collar, is usually considered self-evident, but as I argue in this article, in the Soviet Union, and in Russia at the post-socialist time, the Mari female teacher’s dress served two practices. Firstly, clothing represented position and agency of power, the socialist ideal, and later the political trend of the majority. Secondly, clothing represented traditional, everyday Mari life.

Creating a “Lapp” Character

This article explores the ways in which the Sámi were represented in the early years of established theatre in Finland, starting with the Finnish Theatre (Suomalainen Teatteri) in 1872 and its successor the Finnish National Theatre (Suomen kansallisteatteri), 1902. Particular attention is paid to the role of costumes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their designs often involving the consultation of ethnographers, archaeologists, historians and visual artists. The widest archival evidence for this study consists of theatre photographs and plays, supported by contemporary publications and newspaper articles. Textual sources were augmented by the study of Sámi garments. By identifying and analysing the relevant plays, related stage photographs and newspaper reviews, it becomes clear that recurrent ways developed for representing Sámi people on the stage. This development of “Lapp” characters was established through costume in conspicuous ways, with the exaggeration of particular features of Sámi dress leading to a recognizable trope of the “Lapp” costume.

Stadi Derby and the Securitization of Urban Public Space

Stadi Derby is a local football match played in Helsinki, Finland appreciated for its atmosphere and excitement. Simultaneously, the negative characteristics connected to the international football fan culture have become familiar also to those living in the capital area and especially in the surroundings of the stadium. The threat of violence is visible e.g. in the media coverage reporting about the derby. All this has also effect on the way the city dwellers experience the urban public space. In our article, we ask what kind of discourses can be found concerning the relationship between Stadi Derby and the right to public space and what kind of consequences i.e. reactions these discourses create among those city dwellers not involved in the football culture. In order to understand the ways these events and the media coverage over them have effect on urban dwellers we apply securitization theory. We look for speech acts from the media coverage and analyse the ways people respond to these speech acts through material produced via Facebook and a focus group interview. The division between insiders and outsiders to the football culture is clear: The outsiders feel distress, even fear, in consequence of media materials.