The Japanese Issey Miyake, the most mathematical of the great designers, sought inspiration in geometry to find innovative and aesthetic solutions to one of the oldest problems of civilization: how best to cover a human body, and its curves, with a flat fabric?
The fact that this problem is inherently mathematical may seem surprising, but it has not gone unnoticed by great mathematicians in history. As early as 1770, Leonhard Euler asked himself “what surfaces can be covered with paper, which can bend but not stretch or tear?”
In a paper published in the Annals of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, he called such surfaces “foldable”, pointing out that the cylinder and cone are foldable, but the sphere is not. This is the fundamental problem of cartography: it is not possible to represent the spherical surface of the Earth in the form of a flat map without “stretching” or “tearing” the image.
But Euler went further, proving an important theorem about folding surfaces: they must be ruled, that is, completely formed by straight lines contained in the surface. It is a concept that geometers know well, but which in the sewing world has another name: pleated surface.
It is therefore no accident that many of Miyake’s most spectacular models were made with pleated fabrics.
The theory started by Euler was continued a century later by Pafnuty Chebyshev, one of the greatest Russian mathematicians of all time, in an 1878 work entitled “On the Cutting of Clothes”. An important evolution is that, instead of paper, he thought of clothes made with fabric, which has quite different properties and allowed him to find new solutions to the problem.
Again, although Chebyshev’s work was never published, several of his ideas were rediscovered by Miyake in his artistic creation process and incorporated into his pieces.
Born in the Japanese city of Hiroshima, Miyake was 7 years old when his school was hit by the first atomic bomb in human history. From the episode, there were physical sequels that carried his whole life. He developed much of his career in France, where he was the subject of several distinctions. He passed away in Tokyo on Friday (5).
