From a McDonald’s Collaboration to Pitti Uomo, Finnish Brand VAIN Is One to Watch

Not even a marketing guru could have masterminded the viral moment VAIN, a Finnish brand, achieved last November with a collection made from workwear collected from regional McDonald’s locations, and presented at a Helsinki branch of the global chain. With their tightly edited Pitti Uomo debut, creative director Jimi Vain and CEO/photographer Roope Reinola prove that they deserve more than a Happy Meal-sized portion of the industry’s attention.

Pieces like a white button-down shirt with an extra-long pendant placket and sleeves that button the full length of the arm, or a deadstock leather trench made with intricate lapels and embroidery details have a direct appeal, but for my money the inherent contradictions the founders are grappling with take VAIN beyond the surface.

It’s not attractive to be vain, especially in Nordic cultures where modesty is a virtue. In Finnish though “vain” translates to “only” in the sense of merely. The brand name plays with ideas of peacockery and humility, which in turn introduces another binary, that of the brand’s aesthetic, which “is dark,” Vain said on a call, “because we have the Finnish melancholy in us, but at the same time we have the heart motif behind it and we are sharing love globally with the brand.”

Vain and Reinola grew up in Finland’s Bible Belt, where McDonald’s, “was the only like thing from overseas” and a popular teen hang-out. Now based in Helsinki, the business partners are part of a creative group with close links to the music scene. (The black and white line-up shown at Pitti was a sharp take on a kind of emo/nü metal vibe.) But the work still references the brand founders’ small-town and scrappy DIY roots.

While graduates of the capital’s Aalto University are working at many luxury houses, VAIN the brand is an outgrowth of Vain’s personal experimentation outside of school and corporations. It seems significant that he describes himself as an artist rather than a designer, as it suggests a prioritization of “vision” and a disregard for convention.

Admittedly VAIN is still in its early days, but one of the reasons they are commanding attention is because they are designing for a specific audience: themselves and their peer group, and you are very welcome to join the party.

VAIN has succeeded in creating “their own viral moment without external help,” says Chris Vidal Tenomaa, the editor in chief of the biannual fashion and cultural magazine SSAW and the photographer of this season’s lookbook. “They’ve created a wave of excitement (with young kids especially) that I don’t think has been seen in Helsinki before. A total phenomena of our time from the land of darkness.”

From a big-picture view, VAIN is a forward looking brand, but the theme of the fall offering was nostalgic. It turns out that it’s not only Gen Xers who have fond feelings for a pre-Interet world. In their press statement, VAIN explained that the collection looked “back to the early 2000s rural Finland, the time and place before the internet and social media ruled everything. The time when the music, movies, posters, and video games—and your older siblings were the source of inspiration and information. The world was filtered through your older siblings. Back then it was a little something, now it’s always everything simultaneously.”