LAURENTIUS.LAB designs new artifacts combining art, fashion and mathematics. Loe Feijs is a scientist in residence at Fashion Tech Farm and as a professor emeritus of Industrial Design in the "Making With" cluster, he teaches in Crafting Wearable Senses at TU/e. Loe has his own label LAURENTIUS.LAB operating from Sittard, The Netherlands. His vision is that the combination of art, fashion and mathematics is a rich playing field worth exploring. For this project, I am grateful for the support and contributions by Fashion Tech Farm, notably Jasmijn van den Hurk and Rens Kwakkenbos . Jasmijn made the red shirt and Rens made the blue dress.
Looks
Red Inhibiscus Hawaii shirt
Garment construction by Jasmijn van den Hurk, model Rens Kwakkenbos, photographer Jasmijn van den Hurk
Red Inhibiscus Hawaii shirt
Garment construction by Jasmijn van den Hurk, model Rens Kwakkenbos, photographer Jasmijn van den Hurk
About the look
Red Inhibiscus Hawaii shirt
Sublimation print on recycled polyester
2026
The inhibiscus is a new type of abstract flower. Its name combines two words: hibiscus and inhibition. An inhibiscus is a very beautiful flower, often used as a motif for Hawaii shirts. Inhibition is a biological mechanism which regulates the levels of growth hormones in plants and therefore also phyllotaxis, that is, how plants produce spirals and spiral arms, often Fibonacci-numbered. In my quest to understand phyllotaxis I found that the mathematical models of Marzec and the simulation models of Douady can be turned inside out. The inverse of a golden spiral is a golden spiral again. The inhibiscus is made of polar plots of inhibition levels of individual primordia and a contour representing the sum of the latter. The valleys in the contour predict the next primordium to be born. The biological mechanism at work in a plant's meristem, for the first time, appears as another flower. The main mathematical tool is circle inversion. The inhibiscus is a new intuition for the phenomenon that a golden flower continues its growth while re-using the same golden divergence angle. The theory is described in my forthcoming Bridges paper. The simulations are fascinating too, but harder to visualize. I want to use the power of fashion to share the core of my research on phyllotaxis. The inhibiscus looks like a flower itself and here it is rendered in a two-tone setting. The inhibiscuses are positioned in a wallpaper pattern with glide reflections (group pg, orbifold notation xx).
Red inhisbiscus Hawaii shirt and Blue Inhibiscus Hawaii dress
Garment construction by Jasmijn van den Hurk and Rens Kwakkenbos, models Rens Kwakkenbos en Josje van der Lubben, photograph by Jasmijn van den Hurk.
Blue Inhibiscus Hawaii dress
Garment construction by Rens Kwakkenbos, model Josje van der Lubben, photograph by Jasmijn van den Hurk.
About the look
Blue Inhibiscus Hawaii dress
Sublimation print on recycled polyester
2026
The blue dress, as is the red shirt, is printed using sublimation printing. This is a technique where the print is first made on special paper, and thereafter transferred to the fabric using a calendar press. The same two-tone abstracted inhibiscus is used as for the blue shirt, but now the inhibiscus flowers are larger. The inhibiscus is generated by a computer program written in Processing 3 (Java) which produces the polar plots and the summed inhibition backplane contour in vector graphics format (pdf). The calculation of the polar plot uses a distance function with a 1 over r formula for the radial inhibition-effect and which is bell-shaped for the angular effect. Next, taking the vector graphics, the two-tone color scheme is created in Illustrator, and so is the wallpaper.
