Sarajevo Artist Creates Math-Inspired Origami Dresses From Paper, Textiles

While most of us have forgotten the basics of high-school geometry, Sarajevo student-designer Amila Hrustic finds inspiration in the ancient branch of mathematics. "Plato's Collection," an assortment of origami-esque dresses made from paper and textiles, is a mass of edges, vertices, and faces, with each dress corresponding to one of the five Platonic solids (the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron). What culminates is a series of artfully structured forms that are as pleasing to the eye as they are mathematically sublime.

BEAUTY AND BRAINS

Amila Hrustic, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Sarajevo, found herself gravitating towards geometry—specifically Platonic solids—during her four years studying product design. Her love affair with the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron led to her diploma project, “Plato’s Collection,” a line of dresses that embody the forms’ aesthetic beauty and symmetry. Coupled with Hrustic’s use of black-and-white printed patterns, the end result is a dramatic lineup ideal for fashion editorials or the theatrical stage.

In the same way that Plato theorized that the five Platonic solids were the building blocks of the universe—earth was associated with the cube, air with the octahedron, and so forth—Hrustic used the same shapes as the basis of her dresses. Constructed from recyclable paper and fabric, the garments are made almost entirely by hand, without, as Hrustic describes it, any “machines or things that could damage body or nature.”

The concept of geometry may appear far removed from the world of fashion, but Plato’s Collection provides us with five direct proofs of a correlation that we’re not about to argue with.

Plato theorized that the five Platonic solids were the building blocks of the universe.