2025 Bridges Conference Math + Fashion

Troy Nachtigall

Designers

Troy Nachtigall

Designer, Designer Researcher

Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, TU/e

Amsterdam / Eindhoven

t.r.nachtigall@hva.nl

troykyo.net

View exhibition history

Biography

Nami Levy and Troy Nachtigall collaborate at the intersection of inherent material intelligence, computational aesthetics, and the cultural depth of clothing. Their design practice is situated at the intersection of algorithmic pattern generation and embodied making, focusing on garments as systems of knowledge, care, and construction. Born in Nagano, Japan, Nami Levy grew up observing her mother mend clothes with precision and care. This formative experience shaped a lifelong attention to the value of repair. After becoming a mother herself, Levy began mending garments for her children, discovering in the process that clothing repair could be a joyful, creative act shared across generations. She explores how children could participate in these processes, authoring Mending With Kids, a book that extends her Sashiko practice into the realm of pedagogy and play. Her work reflects a deep respect for handcraft, cultural continuity, and the narrative potential of textiles. Each stitch becomes a site of memory, durability, and design. Troy Nachtigall is Professor of Fashion Research and Technology at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Eindhoven University of Technology. Trained in fashion, interaction design, and computational systems, he works across design, design research, wearable data, and digital fabrication. Nachtigall’s research investigates garments as programmable, responsive systems, developing methods for integrating algorithmic structure, personalization, and responsive behavior into clothing. His approach emphasizes the co-evolution of textile structure, body data, and computational form. By treating garments as both interface and infrastructure, he challenges the boundaries between physical and digital, craft and code, wearer and system.

Looks

Image for look '“Rethinking Voronoi Aesthetics through Sashiko Embroidery on a Leather Kimono” Designers: Nami Levy & Troy Nachtigall'

A contemporary interpretation of the kimono, constructed entirely from rectangles—true to its traditional form—yet reimagined in leather, an unconventional material.

Model Brun Stöver, Stylist Holly Krueger

Image for look '“Rethinking Voronoi Aesthetics through Sashiko Embroidery on a Leather Kimono” Designers: Nami Levy & Troy Nachtigall'

Detail of Sashiko embroidery reinterpreting the Voronoi diagram through hand embroidery that disrupts the typical Voronoi aesthetic with graduated thread saturation, shifting from deep indigo to white, matching the tones of the leather.

Photo: Holly Krueger

Image for look '“Rethinking Voronoi Aesthetics through Sashiko Embroidery on a Leather Kimono” Designers: Nami Levy & Troy Nachtigall'

Process samples of traditional Sashiko embroidery made by Nami that inform the development of a Voronoi-based pattern. The reverse side of the leather kimono is shown to reveal both the difficulty of stitching gradients by hand and the structural logic emerging through the craft.

Photo: Holly Krueger

Image for look '“Rethinking Voronoi Aesthetics through Sashiko Embroidery on a Leather Kimono” Designers: Nami Levy & Troy Nachtigall'

The Armor of Mathematics: Voronoi Diagram Aesthetics in Embroidery

Model Brun Stöver, Stylist Holly Krueger

Image for look '“Rethinking Voronoi Aesthetics through Sashiko Embroidery on a Leather Kimono” Designers: Nami Levy & Troy Nachtigall'

Nami manually punches and stitches each hole for the embroidery—a necessity for leather, which the digital embroidery machine (seen in the background) could not process. This slow method enabled crafting a more nuanced color gradient that would be challenging digitally.

Photo: Pierre Lévy

About the look

“Rethinking Voronoi Aesthetics through Sashiko Embroidery on a Leather Kimono” Designers: Nami Levy & Troy Nachtigall

Algorithmic Embroidery on Leather

2020

This kimono explores the intersection of Sashiko embroidery and algorithmic aesthetics by reinterpreting traditional tessellations using Voronoi diagrams. While Sashiko historically engages in geometries based on grid logic tesselations, this piece introduces a spatial distribution derived from a Voronoi Diagram. The project pursues a re-aestheticization of the Voronoi aesthetic, maintaining the mathematical structure but expressing it through an embodied technique. It proposes a different way to perceive algorithmic design, where hand, material, and code are mutually co-constructive. Nami Levy conducted a series of embroidery studies, iteratively testing scale, spacing, and saturation. She then reinterpreted our Voronoi diagram through extensive hand-embroidery, displacing the everyday digital aesthetic with a tactile, crafted expression. The Voronoi diagram was generated using a custom tool for shoes developed by Loe Feijs and Troy Nachtigall. The generator tends to produce a recognizable visual language of Voronoi Diagrams, but in this project, we intentionally wanted to disrupt that commonly identified aesthetic. The kimono is constructed from hand-dyed leather in a desaturated gradient palette. The embroidery thread colors were selected to shift subtly in chromatic saturation, harmonizing with the tonal variations of the leather. The effect is a dynamic surface that engages both light and geometry. We create the Kimono with leather using Sashiko embroidery to evoke the origins of reinforcing armor, reimagining protection through computational craft and material resilience; Sashiko (刺し子), meaning “little stabs,” originated in Japan as a functional embroidery technique used primarily for reinforcement and repair. This work was developed as part of ongoing research into mathematical textile design and computational craft at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Wearable Senses Lab of the Industrial Design faculty.