Pleats Please: the Story of the World's Oldest Fashion Technique

Summary

Haptic & Hue: Episode Summary – "Pleats Please: The Story of the World's Oldest Fashion Technique"

Released on March 6, 2025

Introduction: The Timeless Allure of Pleats

In the latest episode of Haptic & Hue's Tales of Textiles, host Jo Andrews delves into the enduring charm of pleats, a fashion technique that has transcended millennia. Andrews highlights the remarkable continuity of pleating, noting, “It seems pleats please us all” (00:00). This episode explores the historical significance, technical mastery, and cultural impact of pleats, weaving together insights from fashion historians, textile experts, and contemporary practitioners.

Historical Significance: Unearthing the Taqan Dress

The episode opens with a journey to the Pea Tree Museum in London, home to the Taqan dress, recognized as the world's oldest complete woven garment. Curator Anna Garnett explains, “The pleating is sort of all over the bodice and down the sleeves... it’s a type of knife pleating, which is a technique that’s still used today” (03:20).

Discovered in 1913 by Professor Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, the Taqan dress dates back to between 3482 and 3102 BC. Garnett recounts the garment's treacherous preservation journey: “They laid in wait during the period of the Second World War... eventually re-excavated in the 1970s” (04:50). The dress exhibits signs of wear, including creases and sweat stains, humanizing the ancient Egyptians who once wore it.

The Art and Science of Pleating: Insights from George Kaladjian

Transitioning to the technical aspects, Andrews introduces George Kaladjian, a master pleater from New York’s garment district and author of The Fundamentals. Kaladjian breaks down pleating into fundamental types: “There are only three ways to fold a piece of fabric... and only two shapes of pleating” (10:43). His expertise underscores the complexity and precision required to create pleats that enhance garment shape and movement.

Kaladjian shares his passion for pleats, emphasizing their unique capacity to add volume and drama: “What is unique to pleating... is volume. It has a way of collapsing a tremendous amount of volume in a very neat, systematic way” (17:43). He highlights iconic pleated garments, including Marilyn Monroe’s famous dresses, affirming the timeless appeal of pleats in high fashion.

The Delphos Dress: Fortuny’s Revolutionary Creation

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Mariano Fortuny’s Delphos dress, an early 20th-century masterpiece that reinvigorated pleating techniques. Fashion historian Rachel Elspeth Grose provides context: “When the Delphos gown came out, people referred to it as a tea dress because it had the implications of informality” (22:03). The dress broke societal norms with its free-flowing, revealing design, challenging the restrictive fashions of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Grose delves into the enigmatic origins of the Delphos pleats, suggesting that Henriette Necron, Fortuny’s partner, was the true innovator behind the technique: “The patent is the property of Madame Henriette Brassart... Henriette had all the skills to do this” (25:02). Despite Fortuny’s prominent name, Grose argues that Necron’s contributions were pivotal yet historically overshadowed.

Recreating the Delphos Pleats: Liane Kanda’s Scientific Approach

The episode introduces Liane Kanda, an associate professor of biology at Ithaca College, who embarked on a decade-long quest to replicate the Delphos pleats. Kanda describes her methodical experimentation: “The first thing I tried was a shibori technique...but they wouldn’t last” (33:44). Her breakthrough came with the use of an autoclave, enabling high-temperature pressure to set the pleats permanently: “The autoclave delivered a great permanent pleat” (35:04).

Kanda’s persistence culminated in a precise pleating process that honors the original Delphos design. She reflects on her achievement, stating, “She has now made seven dresses out of her beautiful pleated silk... they look like pretty perfect replicas” (37:35). Her success not only pays homage to historical techniques but also bridges the past with modern scientific methods.

Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of Pleats

Jo Andrews wraps up the episode by celebrating the multifaceted legacy of pleats: “A dress is never just a dress. It carries with itself its own stories and messages” (38:13). From ancient Egyptian tombs to Hollywood glamor and scientific recreation, pleats continue to be a significant element in the narrative of fashion and textiles.

Listeners are encouraged to explore further through Haptic & Hue’s website, where photographs of the discussed garments and additional resources are available. The episode underscores the intricate interplay between tradition and innovation, illustrating how a simple fold of fabric can encapsulate centuries of human creativity and expression.

Notable Quotes:

• Jo Andrews (00:00): “It is incredible to think that there's a fashion technique that we can say with confidence has been in continuous use for over 5,000 years.”

• Rachel Elspeth Grose (02:02): “People sometimes write fashion off... But clothing also tells us about what its wearer likes, loves, fears, worries about.”

• Anna Garnett (03:20): “This is a type of knife pleating, which is a technique that’s still used today.”

• George Kaladjian (10:43): “There are only three ways to fold a piece of fabric... and only two shapes of pleating.”

• Rachel Elspeth Grose (25:02): “The patent is the property of Madame Henriette Brassart... Henriette had all the skills to do this.”

• Liane Kanda (35:04): “The autoclave delivered a great permanent pleat.”

Further Listening:

In the next episode, Jo Andrews will converse with Professor Andrew Groves from the Westminster Men's Archive, exploring the distinct functions and perceptions of men's and women's clothing.

Connect with Haptic & Hue:

Visit www.hapticandhue.com for more episodes, detailed notes, and resources related to the stories of textiles that shape our world.

Transcript

[Jo Andrews]

Foreign. Welcome to the new episode of Haptic and Hughes Tales of Text Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews and I'm a hand weaver interested in how textiles and fiber change what we know about the human story. For too long, this information has been overlooked and often ignored in the accounts of our communities. And whatever else is going on in your life, I hope you find the next 4:40 minutes a calm space in which to hear tales that change the way you see history. Because it seems to me that being able to understand the past in a better way helps each one of us find a clearer path through the present and the future. It's incredible to think that there's a fashion technique that we can say with confidence has been in continuous use for over 5,000 years. Put an ancient Egyptian in the front row of a fashion show today and they'd marvel at the color and the abundance of the fabric on display. But they would nod knowingly at the use of pleats, which has come down the millennia from them to us. It seems pleats please us all.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

I feel like there's just something elegant and something magical about a pleat. It's like a place where fashion and life and math all kind of like coalesce. I just think it's magic. People sometimes write fashion off. We as a culture can look at clothing that is expensive and say it's luxury, it's decadence, it's excess, and it can be all of those things for sure. But clothing also tells us about what its wearer likes, loves, fears, worries about. I mean, all of that's in our clothing. And if you're adding pleats for any gender, any type of garment, you're adding a kind of gravitas, you're giving movement, but it's hidden. It's sleek, they're just fun.

[Jo Andrews]

That's Rachel Elspeth Grose, a fashion historian, and we'll hear from her again as she's been looking at a very important set of pleats and their creator. But first, we travel to a small and little known museum in London. The Pea Tree Museum is free to visit. It's tucked away in the centre of the city and it has some real treasures in it, including the Taqan dress.

[Anna Garnett]

We know now, thanks to scientific analysis, that the dress is the world's oldest known, most complete woven garment. So we know that it's over 5,000 years old. To be precise, it's been radiocarbon dated to between 3482 and 3102 BC with a 95% accuracy.

[Jo Andrews]

Anna Garnett is the curator of the museum.

[Anna Garnett]

So the pleating is sort of all over the bodice and down the sleeves. And while there's some debate over how the pleating was produced, the strongest argument is that it's a type of knife pleating. So a hot metal knife type object would have been used to pleat the material, which is a technique that's still used today. So this is, you know, many thousands of years ago, this is a technique that really produced such a beautiful end product in this garment.

[Jo Andrews]

It is a miracle in many ways that the Taquan dress survived at all and was then identified as a garment. It was found in 1913 at a dig being run by the man who's known as the father of Egyptian archaeology, Professor Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, to give him his full name and title.

[Anna Garnett]

And it was excavated by Flinders Petrie and his Egyptian workforces as part of, so it goes, a very, very large muddy bundle of textiles. So this bundle was, at some point it had been turfed out of an elite burial at the site of Tarkan, which is one of Egypt's oldest and most important cemeteries. And so the Tarkan dress as we know it today was excavated as a very muddy, apparently absolutely stinky bundle of textiles, along with many other textiles just bundled up.

[Jo Andrews]

Flinders Petrie didn't really know what this bundle was and interestingly, he didn't try to find out.

[Anna Garnett]

So Flinders Petrie, he had an approach that was incredibly innovative at the time. So he is known to have kept small objects or strange objects, something that he just didn't know what the function of them was because he believed that someone in the future would have developed the scientific analysis and the knowledge to be able to study that material and to find out more. And so the Tarkan textiles are really testament to that approach. So Petrie retained these textiles in a very stinky, muddy bundle. They were exported to London to what was then the UCL Egyptian Museum. And ultimately they laid in wait during the period of the Second World War, right up until the 1970s when they were essentially re excavated.

[Jo Andrews]

In the museum, two textile experts, Rosalind Jansen and Sheila Landy, set about the incredibly difficult task of prizing the dress from the mud, not at that stage really knowing what they had.

[Anna Garnett]

I don't know if we have an old garment in our wardrobe from 50 years ago. I have a dress of my grandmother's. It's well made. But of course the textile is old and fragile, so we take good care of it. We're talking about textiles that are 5,000 years old. So Rosalyn Janssen worked closely with the Victoria and Albert Museum's conservation labs and a wonderful conservator called Sheila Landy. Their dedicated work over several years meant that this muddy bundle of textiles was sort of re excavated and conserved really beautifully to reveal these internationally important textiles.

[Jo Andrews]

And what they discovered was that amazingly, this garment showed clear signs of having been worn. It was inside out and had other signs of wear.

[Anna Garnett]

So the garment itself would have been worn by someone and then taken off, turned inside out and placed in the tomb. And we don't know if it was deliberately turned inside out for the burial. We're not sure about that, or whether it was just the case that someone had worn it, turned it inside out and it was not turned right side out before it was put into the burial. I think it's quite telling that. So firstly, we know that someone at least tried it on to turn it inside out. But there are also traces of use where Rosalind Jansen noted. So these are in particular creases on the elbows. But by all accounts, there's also slight staining under the armpits. So this is 5,000 year old wear of this textile.

[Jo Andrews]

Who knew that even after more than 5,000 years, sweat stains under the armpits persist. It makes the Egyptians, who we tend to think of as gods, queens, kings, seem that much more human. Anna says we will never know who the dress was made for. When you see it, it looks small. And it's true the Egyptians were much smaller than us. Their diet wasn't nearly so good. But she has her own dreams about the original owner.

[Anna Garnett]

I'd like to think it was worn by a child or a teenager. And partly because there's so little evidence for childhood in the archaeological record. In ancient Egypt, often a lot of what we know about children is through their parents and how they're shown with their parents and part of their family. But those sorts of material traces of childhood in the archaeological record are largely absent. So for me, and this is really just me daydreaming here, there's no evidence for this, but I would like to think that what we're looking at is something that was worn and enjoyed by a child 5,000 years ago. That would be very nice.

[Jo Andrews]

It seems from the beginning of time people have tried to give that extra dimension to their clothes. We have surviving fabric from the Iron Age that uses spin patterning to produce a 3D semi pleated effect. This is where yarns are tightly spun in different directions and then woven together. Also there's a form of weaving known as barred damask that can produce a ribbed effect. But if you really want to know about throwing folding fabric, then the man you need is George Kaladjian. He comes from a big Armenian family who have lived variously in Lebanon, Syria, and New York. He's written the definitive book called the Fundamentals, and it was published last year.

[George Kaladjian]

So if you boil it down, there's only three ways to fold a piece of fabric. Okay, there's an accordion pleat, a side pleat, and a box pleat. And there's only two shapes of pleating, which is straight pleating or sunburst pleating. Basically, straight pleating, the lines are all parallel, and sunburst pleating, the lines are all emanating from a center point. And if you take those combinations and mix them together, you get basically eight classic styles of pleating. The dividing point between these types of pleading is, can something be done on a machine, or can it be done in a mold? And usually if something is very small, you know, smaller than, let's just say, 7 millimeters, 6 millimeters, usually it's in the domain of a machine. And if it's something where the lines are not necessarily parallel to each other, then it is in the domain of a mold.

[Jo Andrews]

George runs a company called Tom Sons Pleating in New York's garment district with his father, Leon. They're master pleaters who understand the incredibly complex world of how to create pleats that interact with fabric to enhance the shape of a garment and add texture and movement.

[George Kaladjian]

The molds are just made of cardboard, and they're scored, and they're folded over and over again and broken into. To be able to flatten and contract flat on a table with a positive and a negative.

[Jo Andrews]

And you fit the fabric to the mold correct.

[George Kaladjian]

So we basically stretch the mold so that it's as flat as possible. We place the fabric inside of the mold, and then we put a cover on it, and then we contract it, or I should say condense it together so that it collapses. And then we bind it, and we put it in a giant steam cabinet. We say we cook it, and it basically permanently sets the pleating. Permanent is a relative term, but as permanent as possible.

[Jo Andrews]

George's grandmother first taught herself the art of pleating back in Syria, and George says her hands were like gold. She kept the technique of what she did completely secret, only passing it behind locked doors to his father, although in time, his entire family became involved in the business, something that makes watching red carpet events a very different experience. Because it's not the dresses they're looking at, but the quality of the pleats.

[George Kaladjian]

I can't tell who did it often, but I can definitely tell whether they knew what they were doing.

[Jo Andrews]

So can, you can look at a dress and go, God, that's terrible.

[George Kaladjian]

Oh, totally, totally, totally, totally, totally. I mean, that's actually how I was raised. When I was a child, you know, my father and my mother or my uncles, they would go to all the big department stores here in New York and they would look at the, the garments in the window and there would be very big names in the window and they would say, that's. I'm not going to say any names. That's. Look at that seam. Why did they put it there? What? Those people don't know what they're doing over there. Can anyone see this? So, you know, when I was a child, I would hear all of this, like, nitpicking and not really realizing I wasn't paying attention. I would say consciously I wasn't paying attention. But it wasn't until, like I would say 20 years later that I realized how much I learned when I was a child. Just by being in the room and being in the environment and hearing people, no, no, move it again, do it again, or you have to do it this way. So, you know, I'm a big proponent of people starting very early and especially family businesses. I mean, literally, like me, I started when I was apparently seven years old. It wasn't like my father gave me a punch card and I had to log in my hours, you know, I mean, you come to work with your, with your mother and father and you have to help them, you know, and son, come here, put your hand here. One second. No, don't hold it like that. Son, hold it like this. And you know, by doing this over and over through the years, I was learning, you know, I was learning and I was contributing to the family, you know, to the survival of the family. I didn't realize it back then, but now I realize the result is that.

[Jo Andrews]

People who want the kind of pleat that can't be hand sewn at home but needs a machine or a higher level of skill come to Tom's Sons.

[George Kaladjian]

All of the local high end designers come to us. We do have a lot of international designers that come to us, usually when it's something that can't be done by someone else locally or closer to them. We're kind of known for doing things that defy the laws of physics. And the Metropolitan Museum has come to us A lot of people that need to restore garments come to us when they want it to be done meticulously, as close as possible to actually restoring the garment. And also just regular home sewers that have a passion for sewing. We do not exclude anyone who wants to experience what it means to work with a professional pleater.

[Jo Andrews]

And that means that no matter how small their budget, Tom's son's pleaters will help them get the perfect pleat. George has also carried out some incredibly demanding pleats.

[George Kaladjian]

There was one project which doesn't seem very exciting to think about, but it was just an incredibly long pleat. It was 14ft long, the pleats. And when you get to that length, it's very difficult to draw a straight line. You know, you take for granted. You grab a ruler, a little ruler, and then you draw a straight line, and you do them parallel, and it looks fine. But when you're doing it 14ft long, it's really hard to find something that is that straight, because I was finding, like, long steel beams, but they would flex. They were flexible, you know, and so you would draw the line, and literally one eighth of an inch, a quarter of an inch, this giant piece of metal would be bending. So doing that particular project was very, very enlightening and required me to really dig deep into the physics of, like, what's happening. You know, as you start to grow, you start to look more at the minutia, the smaller details than the bigger details.

[Jo Andrews]

They've pleated everything from the finest chiffon to leather. For George, nothing really replaces the pleat on a garment.

[George Kaladjian]

What is unique to pleating that something else cannot do is volume. It has a way of collapsing a tremendous amount of volume in a very neat, systematic way. And it creates a lot of drama by exposing that volume. It allows, from a comfort perspective, it allows more movement. But in my opinion, the thing that really makes pleading beautiful is seeing the movement of the pleats and deep pleats. And what I mean when I say deep pleats is that pleating that consumes a lot of fabric is just. For me, it's so beautiful to look at. You know, the most simplest, straight, deep pleat hanging on a hanger doesn't look exciting, but when it's moving, I mean, for me, it's. It's just so much beautiful movement that I love it.

[Jo Andrews]

And, yes, he does have a couple of favorite pleated garments.

[George Kaladjian]

So here's what I feel about that. I fall in love with many garments, and then till the next one comes along, because we're always Making something new. But I will say this, two of my favorite garments were the dresses worn by Marilyn Monroe. So you have the iconic Subway dress and you have the gold dress. And if you think about it, I saw a website one time and it talked about the 10 most iconic dresses in the world. And the top three were the Audrey Hepburn dress. And then the other two were the two Marilyn Monroe dresses. So the top two of the top three most iconic dresses in the world were pleated. So that should say something about pleats.

[Jo Andrews]

There's another 20th century dress that's also iconic and it too was pleated. But this one wasn't made for Hollywood. Instead it was made in Venice. Early in the 20th century, Mariano Fortuny registered a patent for a rippled and pleated fabric that would make up a long, free flowing and revealing garment called the Delphos dress. Fortuny was an extraordinary man, an artist, inventor and fashion designer who worked from a palazzo in Venice. The dress that he launched in 1907 came hot on the heels of an era in which women had dressed in bustles and had been trussed up in corsets with pinched in waists. Unsurprisingly, his dress caused a storm.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

It was a very strange time to have the imperial kind of the world coming to an end. Having the religious world starts to become less religious. Having women talking publicly about not wanting to wear certain types of undergarments. Even the bicycle, right? Like the bicycle is 1870 something, I think. But you can't ride a bicycle. Side saddle, right? So the first bicycle dresses were like wide cut culottes, they're large pants. But we can't say that that would be scandalous. And the idea that within 30 years you don't have to wear a bra, let alone a corset. I mean, there's no panty lines because it's loose. I mean, it is scandalous. If you think about 1907 and you know, someone who's dancing on stage showing their shoulders. No, I mean it's, we, it's hard to be as scandalous right now as it probably was. You know, a century back. People thought of it as dangerous. I mean, religious leaders preached against it. It was going to make you sick, your kids were going to be deformed. I mean, all kinds of social problems because you happen to have shoulders or want to shut your ankles.

[Jo Andrews]

Rachel Elspeth Gross, the fashion historian, says when fortune's Delphos dress came out, it felt exotic.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

I mean, the end of the Victorian, the beginning of the Edwardian, the way that people treated clothing and the way that they interacted with their wardrobes is so different than what we do right now. I think when the Delphos gown came out, people referred to it as a tea dress because it had the implications of informality, Even though the hemline was like 7 inches too long, actually be a tea dress. But it had that decadence, the silk, it had the mystery that comes from these incredibly fine pleats. It felt new. And I think that there's an exoticism to the ancients that has intrigued civilized in quotes, you know, people for as long as we've been considering our history.

[Jo Andrews]

But to begin with, only a few women had the courage to wear it.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

People who wanted and were able to afford to shock in public. I think often of the modern dance movement, which was at the same time was coming out. So we're talking Isadora Duncan and all of her. Her dancers, her adoptive daughters. I mean, ballet as a formal dance has been forever. But the idea of modern dance, of what eventually becomes like jazz and musical theater and all of the variations and all of those things. These women wearing these dresses at this time were able to introduce the world to movement in a way that we hadn't thought of as appropriate for women or even allowed women to do. I mean, you think of all the formal dancing you'll see in a period piece, and it's all very compact, it's all very refined, it's all very exact. And when you can spread your arms, when you can spin, there's a liberty that comes.

[Jo Andrews]

I think, over time, the Delphos dress became incredibly successful. Thousands were made in different styles. People came to love, wear and collect them. They became Fortuny's signature item. The dresses now sell for thousands of dollars apiece, and most fashion and textile museums hold a number of them. After Mariano Fortuny died in 1949, his widow decided the day of the Fortuny dress was over and production ceased. But the folds of these lovely dresses still hold a number of mysteries. The first is the secret of the pleats, which never leaked from the little waterfront factory in Venice. And the second puzzle is who invented the pleating process and designed the dresses? It has always been attributed, to Mariano Fortuny, but Rachel Elspeth Gross says there's good evidence that it was, in fact his lifetime partner and wife, Henriette Necron.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

Well, it's actually Mariano never said it was Mariano. That's one of the parts of this whole story that just, like, makes me nuts. And I copied the exact language from the patent and it says, this patent is the property of Madame Henriette Brassart. Well, that's her mother's maiden name. Who is the inventor. Like, it's written in his handwriting on the patents, the pleading machine to make the Delphos gown. And there's a few theories, a few reasons that people think this. One is that women may not have been able, even if it wasn't officially illegal, it just might not have been allowed for women to get patents in their own name. And if they were able to do so, was it going to take a whole heck of a lot longer? Was it going to be a bigger, more invasive process? And patents are interesting because on the one hand, you really want to protect what you've created. On the other hand, you don't want to make public how you've done what you've done. So there's this dance between exactly enough information to say, hey, this is mine, but also keep it hidden. Which is why people say, we still don't know, you know, how they did this, how they made these pleats. But it's his. I mean, he wrote down it was her. So it's, you know, hard for me to take anyone else's thoughts about that.

[Jo Andrews]

The patents that were filed with for the undulating silk and the dress design, but neither patent described exactly how they made the pleats. And yet we know that Henriette had all the skills to do this.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

She was like a designer. Yes, but she was also an engineer, and she had been working with dyes, like textile dyes, for so long. In many ways, she was a scientist. I mean, maybe like a citizen scientist by today's view. But there are so many photographs that he took of her working, like, at a workbench, sleeves rolled up, like, very. You can see her in the moment, you can see her thinking, and you can see her working it out. And I don't think that the kind of person who could see their partner through that lens and want that to be the picture, you know, like, he wrote her name down in the patent. Of course he gives her credit. It's a very interesting dynamic that the person who we might villainize in another context for taking responsibility, taking credit, all of that. Like he did all of the things you're supposed to do, but the world doesn't remember, even though he's yelling so.

[Jo Andrews]

Even if the museums and reference books ignored her. Rachel Elspeth believes Mariano himself tried his best to give her credit, but the era worked against her. And in the end, it is his name, Fortuny, that is remembered. Just as we remember Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and the other big designers rather than the people who work with them. Nonetheless, Rachel Elspeth says Henriette has achieved a kind of immortality.

[Rachel Elspeth Grose]

She did work under his label, right? Fortuny is the brand. And so that probably has something to do with that confusion. I mean, I don't know. Without having, you know, her, her words, I think we're always going to be surmising, guessing. But it's fun to do that, and it's neat to see that in a time and a place when women were not encouraged to work, that she could effectively make herself immortal, right? Like 100 years later, 200 years later, and 50 years, my kids going to college, and she'll know her name, my daughter will remember.

[Jo Andrews]

Which leaves us with the mystery of the pleats. And to understand a bit more about that, we need to go to a small town in upstate New York to consult an associate professor of biology at Ithaca College who likes dressing up.

[Liane Kanda]

Ecology and sewing have both been part of my life as long as I can remember. I was one of those kids that was, you know, the little nature scientist. I had my microscope, I ran around in the woods. I learned small mammal taxidermy when I was 10. Biology has always been part of me, but so is sewing. My mom taught me how to sew very early on, how to make clothes and how to do hands embroidery. And, you know, that stuck with me. Did a lot of costumes for theater in high school, did it in college just as a volunteer in the costume shop. And that's where I learned to do things like drafting. And so then, you know, that sort of love of sewing has just stayed with me. And I do a lot of fancy dress. So I, I live in a small college town and nobody dresses up for anything. And so back, oh, I mean, this is now over 10 years ago, my group of friends decided, like, well, you know what, we want to dress up. So our New Year's party, it's going to be black tie and me being me, I was like, oh, this gives me the opportunity to make an evening gown, because why else would I ever get to do so?

[Jo Andrews]

Liane Kanda does nothing by halves, as you can probably tell. The next thing that happened was that she bought herself a Delphos dress.

[Liane Kanda]

And I'd been watching one of these very, very high priced vintage auctioneers just so that I could see the, the dresses that were coming through. And there was this small miracle of one that was put up for sale that was very badly damaged and therefore was Much less expensive than the other ones that were being offered, so. So I bought it knowing that I could never wear it. The entire upper shoulder, all the pleats are ripped. There's a very bad stain on it. But it got my hands on one.

[Jo Andrews]

Just so she could see how it's made. Hers is one of the versions made in the 1930s.

[Liane Kanda]

It's that sort of like slightly greenish blue, and it is sleeveless with a basic boat neck. And the shoulders are actually gathered and sewn, which is what most of the later Fortuny dresses, how they were constructed. And from there it's just, you know, the open armhole and straight sheath down. Pretty much all of the Fortuny dresses are really. They're just tubes. If you ever had one of those Halloween costumes as a kid where you just take a trash bag and cut some holes, that's actually. That's the Fortuny dress, that's the Delphos. It's just that because it's very finely pleated, it then forms itself to your body much more and looks elegant instead of like a trash bag.

[Jo Andrews]

I'm not sure that's what Henriette Necrans had in mind, but trash bag or no trash bag, Liane wanted a Delfos dress of her own that she could wear to the New Year's party.

[Liane Kanda]

It started with just seeing a Delphos dress and wanting one and having enough confidence in my own sewing ability to be like, well, I can be able to create something somehow that will get me there. I just need to learn how to pleat. And by the time I was, you know, starting this, there's quite a bit of. Mostly through the Internet, you know, a lot of popular repetition about the Delpho stress and the Delphos pleats with very, very, very little information. But the. The kinds of things that were being said was like, it is very hard to permanently pleat silk. And over and over again, nobody knows how they made the pleats. And then they just. Full stop, well, why don't we try some pleat techniques and find out what gets you something that's like, why don't we try it?

[Jo Andrews]

Leanne wasn't joking. She started a proper scientific experiment. The first thing she tried was a shibori technique from Japan of making pleats by wrapping them around a pole. It made pretty good pleats, but they wouldn't last by themselves, and no one wants a saggy bottom on their Fortuny dress. She tried a number of other approaches, including a sort of alkaline perm, but she had a eureka moment when she realized she needed pressure and a high temperature to set the pleats properly. And her lab had just the thing.

[Liane Kanda]

We have what we refer to as an autoclave, but they're also called steam sterilizers. They're big pressure chambers that get filled with steam and heated so that liquid water in there can go well above 100 degrees, goes to about 120C, and that's why it's able to sterilize equipment. But I also thought maybe it would give me a non scorched but robust pleat.

[Jo Andrews]

That was a major step forward. The autoclave delivered a great permanent pleat. And the added bonus was that her colleagues didn't seem to mind.

[Liane Kanda]

My colleagues are wonderful. They just laughed at me. They were very good sports. And yeah, that the only thing is actually that that very first blue piece that I just showed you, I dyed it before I did the pleading. And I did find out that I have to be very careful about having dye and then putting it in the autoclave that the dye ran all over. Luckily, I had set it in a tray. So there's still one of our autoclave trays floating around the the lab room that is stained glue.

[Jo Andrews]

Leanne's next problem was to scale up production so that there was enough pleated fabric for a dress. She had to buy a big pressure canner and take it home to save the science lab's autoclave. And finally, after nine years of trial and error, she came up with a process of pleating that she felt did justice to the Delphos dress.

[Liane Kanda]

The final technique that really gets the proper Fortuny pleat is not using the Arashi shibori, but actually hand basting threads and then pulling the pleats by pulling the silk along the base threads. The key being that you have to do it under tension so that when you're pulling that fabric along the threads and there's tension lengthwise. And so as it collapses on the one thread and collapses on the next thread, it forms a nice straight pleat line between them. Once that Hank is created concertina. And then you can tie off the threads and it will hold it in a narrow strip. Then it goes through the the pressure cooking process.

[Jo Andrews]

Leanne has written about her precise process and anyone can download her paper and try it out for themselves. The link is on our website at www.hapticandhew.com. she has now made seven dresses out of her beautiful pleated silk. And to my eye, they look like pretty perfect replicas. And yes, she says it was definitely worth nearly 10 years of work.

[Liane Kanda]

Oh, yeah. And also one of the things, especially now that I have a bunch of them, that I can feel more comfortable wearing them. It's like, well, if I, if I mess this thing up wearing it, it's fine now. I think one of the reasons why they were so appealing, like, for, for people who once they had them, that they wanted to wear them over and over and over again, they're so comfortable, so comfortable. I. There's zero restriction, right? It just beautifully lays against you and that's it. And it's like you're wearing nothing at all, but you're perfectly concealed. And it feels so good.

[Jo Andrews]

A dress is never just a dress. It carries with it itself own stories and messages. So the next time you look at a pleat, remember how ancient it is. It whispers of pharaohs and film stars. It can tell you how it traveled across Iron Age Europe and lodged in the kilts of Scotland. How it formed the tunics of ancient Greece and the skirts of China, Song Dynasty, before it was recreated in the soft silk pleats of Fortuny in Venice. Thank you to everyone who took part in this podcast for their long experience and understanding of the world of clean and in Leanne's case, for her extraordinary determination to recreate the right kind of pleat. You can see pictures of her dresses and of the other pleated garments we've spoken about in this episode on our website at www.haptickenhugh.com. haptic and hew is hosted by me, Jo Andrews. It's edited and produced by Bill Taylor. And this episode was sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. Hap, Dick and Hue is an independent production supported entirely by its listeners, either through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Ham. Haptic and Hugh. Friends get access to an extra podcast a month hosted by me and Bill Taylor. And in the next episode of Friends, we'll be talking to Professor Andrew Groves at the unique Westminster Men's Archive about the different functions the clothing of men and women perform and the different way in which which men think about their garments. To join, go to www.hapticandhue.com join, but until then, it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are making.