Photos From The Most Fashionable Nordic City

Years ago, back when I was an aspir­ing hip­ster escap­ing the mun­dane hor­rors of sub­ur­bia, I con­sumed every blog I could find to see what the cool kids were wear­ing. One par­tic­u­lar blog con­vinced me that Helsin­ki was some sar­to­r­i­al promised land, a place where every oth­er Finn was liv­ing out the Brook­lyn fever dream with a Nordic twist.

Hel Looks is the brain­child of fash­ion tech pow­er cou­ple Liisa Joki­nen and Sam­po Kar­jalainen. This Finnish fash­ion bible has been around for near­ly two decades. Joki­nen rem­i­nisces, “In the sum­mer of 2005, day and night, young glam rock kids were hang­ing out­side Kias­ma, the muse­um of con­tem­po­rary art. They were hard­core Hanoi Rocks fans, and their showy, col­or­ful looks caught my atten­tion.” And so, Hel Looks was born and the cou­ple embarked on a mis­sion to cap­ture the city’s most uncon­ven­tion­al trend­set­ters, inter­view­ing them about their dai­ly wardrobe inspi­ra­tions.

I was per­pet­u­al­ly awestruck by these snap­shots of every­day Finns in out­ra­geous­ly mod­ish out­fits, and Hel Looks is still going strong today. Fast for­ward a few years, I found myself liv­ing in Helsin­ki (only to dis­cov­er that not lit­er­al­ly every­one was a walk­ing run­way show) and now I even know some of the peo­ple on that blog per­son­al­ly, and was sur­prised to see their faces come up when I flipped through the pho­tos most recent­ly. I prob­a­bly should­n’t be, because it’s very famous among the fash­ion­able crowd there even now, at times even com­ing off like a Finn-wide inside joke, like I was once told some­thing like “Oh yeah, my friend got approached the oth­er week, she’s on there now” in the most off­hand tone, like it’s just get­ting called up for jury duty.

I was­n’t able to fig­ure out exact­ly why Finnish peo­ple, in par­tic­u­lar, are so styl­ish in the cap­i­tal, but I came to the con­clu­sion that they hold onto their old clothes much longer than some oth­er places in the world would seem to. As a result, a trip to your local UFF (their equiv­a­lent to Good­will if you’re Amer­i­can, or Oxfam/BHF char­i­ty shops if you’re from the UK) eas­i­ly yields the kind of fash­ion grails that get pho­tos of you snapped on the street and post­ed on fash­ion blogs for the rest of the world to see. Who knows, maybe you’ll even look cool enough for a night out with the in crowd at Post Bar.

Still, it con­tin­ues to inter­est me to see how glob­al fash­ion trends are being inter­pret­ed in a very spe­cif­ic part of the world, and how over time this blog has become a time cap­sule doc­u­ment­ing the evo­lu­tion of style over the last two decades, and pos­si­bly the only place remain­ing where we still have to be sub­ject­ed to the 2014 skin-tight jog­gers with long­line tees fad. In fact, true to the pop­u­lar 20-year cycle the­o­ry, the blog is now so old that the old­est trends doc­u­ment­ed on there are com­ing back into style (myspace-era indie sleaze, any­one?)

There are plen­ty more fits to see on the blog, and Liisa always tries to ask the sub­jects what exact­ly they’re wear­ing, where they got it, and what inspired their cur­rent look, which could be any­thing from their mom or the cur­rent sea­son to Flori­da or race cars.

Bonus: The minds who brought you Hel Looks also divide their time between their home coun­try and the US, so nat­u­ral­ly there is also NYC Looks, which takes the same for­mat and points the lens at the inhab­i­tants of New York. There is a lot to see so I’ll let the results speak for them­selves.