In yesterday's post we mentioned Issey Miyake's Pleats Please collection: pleats have always been in fashion (just think about Mariano Fortuny's finely pleated gowns) as also proved by one of the latest designs by the Japanese brand, a pleated bag characterized by uniquely-shaped straight lines, inspired by tree trunks and made with recycled fibers created from plastic bottles and discarded products.
The pleats can expand when you put something inside, radically changing the shape and appearance of the bag that comes in a wide range of colours and sizes.
In most cases fashion designers pleat materials such as fabric or paper to create foldable designs that can therefore expand or retract. The Italian queen of foldable designs remains Nanni Strada, for her studies that anticipated Issey Miyake's.
But there have been also experiments with rigid folds as proved by the striking headdresses designed by Tomihiro Kono's for Junya Watanabe A/W 2015-16 collection.
Italian interior designer Michele De Lucchi played with the regid possibilities of pleats in his "Plissè" collection of domestic appliances for Alessi.
Recently re-released, the collection includes a range of appliances, from an electric kettle to a blender, a hand blender, a toaster and a citrus juicer, in white, black and grey hues.
De Lucchi has always had a passion for designing toy-like objects that have also inspired fashion collections, but in this case he moved from different inspirations - sculpture, architecture, geometric solids, sartorial beauty and the pleated trend from the '50s and the '60s that gives dynamism and elegance to these pieces.
The hand blender echoes the architectural references dear to the designer, it calls indeed to mind a sort of sculpted column whose volumes are harmoniously juxtaposed, while the main shapes of the electric kettle - a cone for the body, a cylinder for the handle, a triangular prism for its spout - are directly borrowed from geometry. The blender recalls instead a dress made out of a light and densely pleated fabric."Plissé is an iconic texture that we decided to use due its cheerful and festive twist. It has been used for the first time in fashion, during the fifties and sixties, when pleated skirts, made of floaty and aerial silks, created whimsical visual effects. This texture is still very contemporary," De Lucchi states about this collection of designs, "Objects, as pieces of furniture, are not only characterized by their functionality, they also fill the space with their presence. Every object has a formal, aesthetic, symbolic and evocative identity, even without expressing its functionality."
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