The news of October was that the first Finnish designer, Paola Suhonen, presented her collection at the Paris Fashion Week. However, this wasn’t completely true – a Paris-based fashion designer Jasmin Santanen did it first, but only a couple months earlier than Paola Suhonen’s IVANAhelsinki. Jasmin Santanen presented the collection carrying her name in a fashion show at the Paris Haute Couture Week in July in connection with other, not yet well-known, but recognized, high-quality fashion houses.

Jasmin Santanen is one of the rare new, young-generation haute couture designers in France. She admits being lucky to have found an atelier willing to make an haute couture collection with her. “Our first collection was haute couture. Production of haute couture requires a department of its own in a company”, she tells. “We don’t have resources for that right now, which is why our aim is to raise the quality of our ready-to-wear collection, make the collection more exhaustive and make detailing the best possible in the future.”

”I would like to bring a more inexpensive collection to the market one day, even if the inexpensive contemporary market with labels such as Marc by Marc Jacobs and See by Chloé was the hardest to get through for a debutant due to harsh competition”, she continues.

From student to teacher

Jasmin Santanen, 37, is warm and talkative. She also smiles a lot. She has lived an international life since the age of 18, when she moved to the USA to work as an au pair. The year she spent in the East Coast and in Hawaii also made her to learn drawing and sewing.

She soon started to study in one of the best design schools in the world, the Parsons School of Design in New York. She moved to Paris in the middle of her studies and graduated at the Parsons’ campus in Paris in 1992.

”I had a strong need to express myself, but I was missing tools”, she says. “I studied fashion design to get the necessary tools and skills.”

Jasmin Santanen worked as a freelance designer in Paris after her graduation and has designed denim collections for Marimekko and Karl Kani, for example. She also gathered fashion business knowledge at Yves Saint Laurent and Hermès.

In 2001, Santanen was invited back to her former school, Parsons, to develop fashion marketing education. She was teaching fashion design and marketing as well as illustration to the Parsons’ fashion design students. She is still teaching them fashion design.

”Paris is like a piece of jewellery”

Paris enchanted Jasmin Santanen when she was only a teenager. “I knew great fashion houses such as Dior and Chanel when I visited Paris for the first time at the age of 12 or 13. Lifestyle, history and discoveries of Paris enchanted me even back then, although I didn’t have a chance to visit shops of Paris.”

Jasmin Santanen’s 17 years in Paris have been rewarding, but not easy. The language, for example, was a real problem to her in the beginning – she moved to Paris without knowing any French.

“There is a bubble about Paris being the same to fashion designers than Hollywood to actors. Nevertheless, Paris is a difficult city in fashion”, says Santanen realistically. “It’s hard to get a paid job and employees are often hired not for their skills, but through co-operations and networking. Hired graduates are also often too trained and skilled for the job they are hired for.”

Santanen admits that her way has rarely been straight and easy. Quite often there hasn’t been the easiest way at all and a choice has had to be made between opportunities that are bad or a bit less bad. However, she states that even the bad things have had to be handled as single issues and not to be taken personally.

Collection is a mission of life

The collection Jasmin Santanen was established in 2004. The collection is poetic and feminine and the materials often very light and delicate.

”I feel close to Miuccia Prada and Olivier Theyskens as a designer. I also admire Coco Chanel; her life and the way she combined bohemian attitude with formality and respect of the situation”, she says.

Jasmin Santanen’s collection for the autumn 2008 will combine people and stories that are mixtures of glamorous life in the limelight and tragedy in the background. The collection will be based on the 1970’s and 1980’s and it will be influenced by velvetiness of Elvis, softness and gracefulness of an artist Dalida, rock-style from Jim Morrison, glamour from opera singer Maria Callas and a silhouette from John Travolta starred movie Saturday Night Fever. “Let’s see how these influences come out in the collection”, says Santanen with a smile.

So far Jasmin Santanen’s company has been small. It takes an organization and a lot of work to take the collection further. “I don’t want to bring myself into the limelight even though the collection has been named after me. I thought about the name for a long time and came out with a decision that the name of the designer will bring credibility to the collection. My ego has nothing to do with it; I just want to make the business work with other professionals.”

“I have accepted this as my mission of life. It’s not possible to go back even though I might get bruised from time to time”, says Jasmin Santanen – with a smile on her face.