If a suit makes a man, as the saying goes, clothing designer Anssi Tuupainen has a big role in creating a man. He is the designer of young and trendy collections of Turo Tailor, the biggest menswear company in the Nordic Countries.

He designs the collections for Turo Tailor’s young and trendy target groups, chooses fabrics, defines levels of price and quality, presents the collections to sales personnel four times a year, chooses products for fashion shows and photo shootings and is strongly involved in the shooting of Turo Red Label, the trendy collection of Turo Tailor. And does a hundred other tasks.

Finnish clothing industry has changed tremendously since Anssi Tuupainen began his job in the industry. It has only been 14 years, but the job of a designer has become more and more versatile and doesn’t only consist of designing anymore. Companies have less and less personnel and requirements for effectiveness are much higher than in the beginning of the 1990’s. Also the amount of companies in the industry has decreased dramatically.

Jobs in appreciated companies

The big audience may remember Anssi Tuupainen, 39, for the Golden Hanger Award given to Turo Red Label, a collection designed by him, in January 2007. However, he has been a household name in the industry for a long time.

Tuupainen was born in Helsinki and raised in Lappeenranta. left home for high school specialised in arts at the age of 15 and studied fashion design at the Lahti Institute of Design at the turn of the 1990’s. He wasn’t sure to become a fashion designer for a long time, and made his first garments in high school, not any earlier.

The young designer started as an assistant for sportswear company Luhta while he was still a student in the beginning of the 1990’s. He was employed right after his graduation, in the middle of the darkest economical recession. “I was very privileged to get a job”, he admits. “Luhta was a large company in Europe and all the new stuff came in there first. It was great to have a real job while still studying – an assistant doesn’t have much, if any, responsibility, but he has a chance to learn everything there is to learn in a large scale industrial process.”

Anssi Tuupainen worked in several Finnish clothing companies after finishing at Luhta: first as a coat designer at Ikiasu Oy, then as a jeans designer for Lee Cooper manufacturer Masi Jeans and as a coat designer for Tiklas. Then he started to design menswear collection St. Jacques for PTA Group. Turo Tailor bought the label after PTA went down, and Anssi Tuupainen started to work for Turo Tailor.

St. Jacques was replaced with Turo Red Label a year ago. In addition to Turo Red Label, he designs a trendy suit collection David Design for the Swedish market and the trendy coat collection Ora, which will come out in the autumn 2008.

“Designing St. Jacques at PTA was a dream come true”, he says. “PTA was a strong, designer-led fashion house with an international way of working – the designers only designed and the rest was in hands of product managers and other staff. My other dream came true when I designed the concept and the collection of Turo Red Label.”

Demanding job

Anssi Tuupainen finished designing women’s clothes six years ago and concentrated on menswear instead. He says he doesn’t even know why.

“Somehow it was very obvious and it felt natural – even at school. We had to make plenty of women’s collection in the third year at school and the whole year went wrong”, he says with a laugh.

“Menswear design is often considered easy, but it is, in fact, quite difficult. Everything is up to small things and details. I feel that even the restrictions are a challenge, because every collection has to have something new and something to tell despite the restrictions. Certain classicism is also great.”

”Menswear design is closer to industrial design than women’s wear design. You can only make small alterations to the product, not go to the limits. And nobody says that industrial design was boring”, says Anssi Tuupainen.

Career in Finland, plenty of travelling all around the world

Turo Tailor is situated in Kuopio, but Anssi Tuupainen has a beautiful, Scandinavian-spirited workroom in Helsinki, in the middle of wooden storerooms in the cellar of an old Art Nouveau building. He spends 1-2 days a week in Kuopio in the busy times of the year, but sometimes he visits the factory only once in 2-3 weeks.

“I intend to continue designing menswear in Finland – at least for now. I might already be too old to work abroad, because a designer often needs work experience in well-known fashion houses”, he says.

“However, I like being in Finland and in Helsinki. I travel a lot and it only takes three hours to fly almost everywhere from Helsinki. For now, I like to operate here."