Uyen Nguyen
The STEM and Leaf Skirts are both part of my Fibonacci Series - a
collection of garments based on the Fibonacci sequence. The STEM
skirt is named partially as a nod to my background as an engineer. I
first started developing the skirt while at Cornell University where
Bin Liu, came up with a design for a radial Miura-ori pattern with a
planar profile. I created a design similar to his but used the
Fibonacci sequence to determine the spacing and create a conical
profile so it could be used as a skirt. I created the first
iteration of this skirt for VOGEL’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection,
which debuted at Vancouver Fashion Week. For this particular
iteration of the skirt, I redesigned the crease pattern so that the
structure would be cylindrically flat-foldable. The skirt has
16-fold rotational symmetry and alternating panels are colored black
and yellow to give it a lenticular effect. Despite the even
distribution of both colors, the left half of the skirt will always
look black and the right half will always look yellow. In the
theoretical model, as you rotate the skirt, the yellow panels are
hidden to expose more black panels (or vice versa) but due to the
rotational symmetry, the appearance of the skirt remains the same.
However, when worn by a human, because a person’s waist isn’t
perfectly circular and more elliptical, different viewing angles can
change the proportion of black and yellow visible. The graphic
t-shirt that shows an aerial view of the skirt design.