Armi Ratia was a legend. With her company Marimekko’s simple, clean designs, she revolutionised the fashion world in the 1950s and 1960s and became Finland’s best-known businesswoman. Thirty-six years after her death, when her old friend Jörn Donner took on the task of portraying the brilliant icon, he chose a rather unconventional approach. Using rehearsals for a stage play as a dramatic device, Donner retells sequences from Armi’s eventful life – and not always in chronological order. He places his subject in the spotlight, portraying her as an idealist driven to excess and one inclined to work herself and others to the bone. But he also reveals her fragile moods, combative at one moment and paranoid or self-destructive at the next. Judging by how intensely the character of Maria (played brilliantly by Minna Haapkylä) struggles to embody the role of Armi on the stage within a film, it seems likely that the real-life Armi was not always so comfortable in her skin.