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On the tables of a new restaurant in Helsinki, in the summer of 1937, sat a glass object with no straight edge anywhere on it. Everything else on those tables was ordinary — plates, cutlery, water glasses with flat sides and a base you could set down without thinking about it. Then this one thing, low and wide, its rim folding in and out like something caught mid-motion.

People wrote about it. They still do, ninety years later.

🏭 A competition, a working title, and a pair of trousers

The vase began the year before, in 1936, when the Karhula-Iittala glassworks ran a design competition for a new glass series. Alvar Aalto entered — Aino, his wife and design partner, is often credited alongside him — submitting a set of free-form pieces roughly drawn on coloured card and sketch paper. The entry carried a working title, in Swedish: Eskimoerindens skinnbuxa — the Eskimo woman's leather trousers.

It is not the name anyone uses now. It won anyway.

🌊 A name that was already sitting in his surname

Here is the detail that makes this story hard to tell cleanly: aalto is an ordinary Finnish word, and an old one. It means wave — the kind wind or a current raises on open water. It was Alvar Aalto's own surname before it was ever a vase.

A designer named Wave submits an entry with folded, water-like curves, and the object ends up looking exactly like what his name already says. That is either a very good story or a very convenient one, and it is worth sitting with the difference for a moment before deciding which.

🗺️ The lake everyone mentions, and the record that does not

Search for this vase and you will find, almost everywhere, the same claim: that Aalto shaped it after the outline of a Finnish lake, or the country's lakes in general — a landscape of lakes and shoreline, poured into glass.

It is a good story. It may even be true in some private, undocumented way — a designer's own account of where an idea came from is not always the kind of thing that gets written down at the time. But it is not the story the record supports. The Alvar Aalto Foundation's own account of the vase, in both its English and Finnish pages, describes the 1936 competition, the working title, and the restaurant it was later named after — and says nothing about lakes at all, or about what the working title itself was supposed to mean.

That second silence gets filled in by other sources, and they do not agree with each other. The working title, Eskimoerindens skinnbuxa, translates plainly to the Eskimo woman's leather trousers. Some Finnish sources that quote it nonetheless trace the vase's folds to a Sámi woman's traditional dress — a different people, from a different part of the map, with no explanation offered for the swap.

Two different explanations for the shape, and a third disagreement hiding inside one of them. Only the working title itself, translated but not interpreted, shows up in the paperwork.

🍽️ How it got the name people actually use

Nobody today calls it Eskimoerindens skinnbuxa. The name that stuck came from somewhere else. When the Aaltos designed the interior of a new Helsinki restaurant called Savoy, which opened in June 1937, this glass series went onto its tables — and the vase has been known as the Savoy vase ever since. That same year, a version of the series travelled to the Finnish pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, where a shape with no straight lines stood out for exactly the reason you would expect.

The restaurant is still there. It was restored in 2020 with the Alvar Aalto Foundation, the dining hall is protected by the Helsinki City Museum, and the vase sits on those tables today, more or less where it was set down in 1937.

💧 A shape that outran its own explanation

Ninety years on, the object has plainly won, whatever its origin turns out to be. It is made today in a range of colours and sizes, still folded the same way, still sold under the Savoy name to people who have mostly never heard of a design competition or a working title in Swedish. Most of them, asked to explain the shape, will say it looks like a lake. They are not wrong to see it that way — a wave and a lake shore are not so different a thing to have in mind, and Finland has no shortage of either. It is just not, as far as the record shows, where the shape came from.

A wave-shaped surname, a competition entry named for someone else's trousers, and a lake that turns up in every retelling but the original one. All three explanations are still in circulation. None of them cancels the others out.

We do not carry the Savoy vase itself. But Aino Aalto's own glassware — the ribbed, wave-patterned series that won a prize the same year the Savoy vase was entered, still made by Iittala, still under her name — sits on our shelves in Linen, one of the newer colours Iittala has added to her range.

P.S. — Helsinki, late October. The clocks went back to winter time last Sunday, and the extra hour of dark in the afternoon is noticeable within a day or two. Ruska, the short autumn color in the trees, is mostly over by now — what is left outside is bare branches and low grey light, the kind that makes a lit restaurant window look warmer than it probably is. Good weather, if nothing else, for sitting still and looking at a glass object for longer than it deserves.