I gotta say, I've never particularly cared for fashion, but when you actually think about it, creating something that looks good and feels comfortable is pretty fucking difficult.
What a physicist sees when she looks at a fancy gown
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: What a physicist sees when she looks at a fancy gown
#12Oh, this is painful to read...
As a physics dropout (hey, '90s tech boom) who works with theatrical costumers on a regular basis as the "engineering" guy (who sews, rhinestones, and hot-glues with the rest of them) there's absolutely a cross-over of material science, geometry, structure, and other engineering practices with fashion/costuming. However, this is almost never formalized around a grounding in physics. Instead, it is ingrained and intuitive in the practitioner. Ask most fashion designers about manifolds, gradients, and curvatures, and you'll get blank stares.
Furthermore, if you're going to write up something to pitch fashion to the sciency/nerdy, how about not asserting that euclidean geometry is purely planar... Gaussian curvature and it's applications to fabric? Sure. Perspective transforms per pattern projection and apparent parallelism/colinearity? Okay. (Neither of these in the article...)
Euclidean geometry is gone when you bend fabric? Oh man. That's where I face-palmed.
If you're going to pitch to nerds, be rock solid on the nerdy stuff, because the larger point, that fabric and fashion are engineering and design practices as much as laptops, cars, and bridges, is arguably true.
I had high hopes for this one, but it comes off as a poorly-crafted attempt to pitch a personal interest as scientifically dismissed because it's feminine (rather than artistically practiced), from a woman who, sadly, doesn't seem well-versed in the technical aspects of the discipline, unselling her point.
Notes:
1) Men design fashion, and have for a long time.
2) It's okay to like something aesthetic and over-the-top without trying to jam it through a science-nerd hole.
Re: What a physicist sees when she looks at a fancy gown
#13Oh, this is painful to read... As a physics dropout (hey, '90s tech boom) who works with theatrical costumers on a regular basis as the "engineering" guy (who sews, rhinestones, and hot-glues with the rest of them) there's absolutely a cross-over of material science, geometry, structure, and other engineering practices with fashion/costuming. However, this is almost never formalized around a grounding in physics. Ins…
> Euclidean geometry is gone when you bend fabric?
Do you just mean that everything is still Euclidean in the complete 3D space of real life? This is true but does not make the 2D-curved-spaced analysis any less fundamental. All curved manifolds (including curved spacetimes) of dimension d can be embedded in a Euclidean space of dimension 2d such that the metric on the former is just the one you get by projecting down from the latter. Insofar as all the quantities you are working with are confined to the curved d-dimensional manifold, it's as fundamental a notion of curved space as ever exists.
Re: What a physicist sees when she looks at a fancy gown
#14Oh, this is painful to read... As a physics dropout (hey, '90s tech boom) who works with theatrical costumers on a regular basis as the "engineering" guy (who sews, rhinestones, and hot-glues with the rest of them) there's absolutely a cross-over of material science, geometry, structure, and other engineering practices with fashion/costuming. However, this is almost never formalized around a grounding in physics. Ins…
> Euclidean geometry is gone when you bend fabric? Do you just mean that everything is still Euclidean in the complete 3D space of real life? This is true but does not make the 2D-curved-spaced analysis any less fundamental. All curved manifolds (including curved spacetimes) of dimension d can be embedded in a Euclidean space of dimension 2d such that the metric on the former is just the one you get by projecting dow…
I was arguing against the author's assertions that:
1) Euclidean geometry is a plane (though, on re-reading, she said that a plane is pure Euclidean geometry). So, to be fair to the author, that may well be me over-reading her statement (could be "within", rather than "equal to").
2) That Burberry's dress on Ruby Rose for the 2017 Met Gala somehow meaningfully steps outside of Euclidean geometry for it's execution. It's a layered skirt composed of rectangular-ish cuts. Any apparent colinearity stems from the center-start of each panel and vertical alignment (aided, visually, by the aspect ratio of the panels).
Maybe the ruching around the body? I don't see it, and to hang an argument for involvement of a field on the particulars of that dress is pretty baffling.
The best I could suggest is that any dress could be called non-euclidean when cut from planar fabric due to the (general) requirement that a dress be at least a genus one manifold (or a public indecency ticket). I don't see anything in Ruby Rose's dress that implies any meaningful departure from or special knowledge of euclidean to non-euclidean considerations.
Except maybe the price tag... That probably bends more than just space...