When I am designing with Jhane, I am inspired by so many things. My painting background influences me to think about pattern, color, texture, brush strokes, light, space (not “outer space” LOL) and transitions. The analytical part of my brain leads me to think about algorithms, iterations, mathematics and fractals. When these things work in conjunction, it’s magic.

Working for Jhane, everything always goes back to fractals, somehow.

At the end of “Geek Fashion”, I mention how some art critics and mathematicians believe that the action paintings of Jackson Pollock are based on fractals. I was so excited by this tidbit of information that one night, after several pints of Guinness, I told my painter friend about this. He wasn’t as excited as I was… He said he had heard that one before and didn’t really put a lot of stock in that theory.  (Since this conversation did take place at the local pub, you can imagine that this is the family-friendly abbreviated version…) Still excited about my new information, I protested, “No, but you don’t understand!  I spend hours a day everyday at work thinking about painting and art and fractals and algorithms!” (To read more about Jackson Pollock and fractals, Jennifer Ouellette wrote a definitive article for Discover Magazine: Pollock’s Fractals.)

Ok, so I admit, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration to exclaim that I spend hours a day thinking about fractals, but it does seem that somehow everything goes back to fractals. To me, the fact that so many experts could find iterations and patterns in the seemingly random paintings of Jackson Pollock…this validated my whole existence…well, at least for that brief moment….

Fractal broccoflower, also known as Romanesco Broccoli

And sometimes I’m not even thinking about work or art or fashion and fractals pop up….Here’s another example:

Jhane and her team are always looking to try new healthy foods. A recent obsession for me was broccoflower from Trader Joe’s produce section. Broccoflower looks like a broccoli-cauliflower hybrid.  It tastes sort of like cauliflower, but slightly different. I admit, it’s mostly the novelty of a new vegetable that thrills me so much! Thinking about the cloned meat controversy, I wanted to know more about how this unusual vegetable came to be.

I did a little research and found out that what I was buying at TJ’s is literally green cauliflower. And that there is a second type of broccolflower, which is the result of broccoli and cauliflower cross-pollinating (which can happen by natural means). This is also known as Romanesco Broccoli, and has beautiful spirals which follow Fibannaci’s sequence. Each big spiral is made up of lots of little spirals, similar to sea shells. To read more about broccoflower, John Walker wrote a great article called “Fractal Food“.

Besides being mathematical equations, fractals also occur quite frequently in nature. If you would like to know more about this, you can check out an episode of Nova, which Jhane participated in (Chapter 3), which is all about fractals.

-Heidi Bender, Assistant Designer at Jhane Barnes Menswear

At Syracuse University in the 1980s I experimented with ways of embodying all kinds of pattern design rules into software as a creative tool using Mathematics. In 1989 I saw an article about how Jhane used  computers to help with fashion design so I brashly wrote to her, claiming that I had ways of infusing the computer software with some creativity. Nada. Then I learned how a loom worked and wrote a program that simulated the loom elements – warp, weft, threading, tieup, peg plan etc. In 1991 I started a little company to launch this product and take the weaving world by storm. That didn’t happen, exactly, but in 1992 we set up a booth at Convergence in Washington where Jhane was the keynote speaker. Jhane came to our booth and bought our little $225 product called WeaveMaker, even though it was a pre-Windows PC program, and Jhane was already into Mac computers. Jhane said she had a déjà vu feeling about something, and it was because she remembered my 1989 letter.

It was a technological misfit because of hardware, but much else was wrong, too. My WeaveMaker had fixed warp and weft sizes and harnesses, determined by my screen resolution. I didn’t know anything about floats or dozens of other weaving essentials. But the combination of my naiveté and Math ideas produced some design elements, particularly warp threadings and color schemes, that were new and appealing to Jhane. Just two months later, Jhane invited me to her studio to show me some fabrics made from WeaveMaker. They were gorgeous, as you would expect from Jhane, but what persistence and insight this lady showed to get good fabrics out of what I provided her! Silk purses from sows’ ears were nothing compared to this!

Thanks to Jhane, I was able to satisfy myself that my idea had merit and could indeed enhance designer creativity. But there was work to be done. Within a few months, I was able to arouse the interest of a colleague at Syracuse University, Dana Cartwright. Dana had the skills to create an all-new version of WeaveMaker that ran on the Mac and incorporated the controls required for serious design work.

The word is synergy. The example is classic. Jhane teaching Dana and me about fashion, weaving, yarns, colors, and design while describing the tools she needed. Dana’s implementation expertise applied to making those tools easy to use and productive. My proclivity for converting word descriptions of design ideas, fabric examples, and even casual observation of elements of Jhane’s style to computer algorithms with extensive application of Mathematics. As a bonus, I was occasionally able to tap the intrinsic order of Mathematical objects to introduce new design ideas that blossomed under Jhane’s magic touch. Yes, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts!

This has been going on for seventeen years. That’s a lot of History, a lot of design, a lot of what is uniquely Jhane.

– Bill Jones, Designer Software, Syracuse, NY

As a toddler, I would climb out of my crib at night and scribble all over my walls with my orange crayons.  Always orange.  I don’t know why my mother didn’t just throw away the orange crayons.  I was always creative, and I excelled in art class, as well as many other right-brained activities.  However, I discovered that I was really good at left-brained activities as well, like math.

My mom is left handed.  She loves to cook, and has a flair for decorating her home — she is typically right-brained.  My dad is extremely left-brained, he’s a numbers guy.  He loves money.com and Business Week, and in fact, I can’t remember ever seeing him read a fiction book.  In high school, I enjoyed both art and math.  I was encouraged by my parents to pursue both activities, but always felt I was supposed to pick one or the other.

Although I took A.P. Calculus my senior year and tested out of all my college math requirements, art did eventually win.  I went to Philadelphia to study painting at Tyler School of Art.  When I got to art school, I met the most amazing group of creative, inspiring, and artistic (right-brained) people.  But the left-brained thinkers were few and far between.

I still felt really unresolved because only half of my brain was being challenged.  Years after I graduated, still trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I started hand knitting.  I realized that I really loved figuring out the interloopings of the yarn which create fabric.  I wanted to design fabric for bulk production.

I attended FIT and studied Textile & Surface Design.  Besides satisfying my creative side, weaving also engaged the left side of my brain — how many vertical threads vs. how many horizontal threads, figuring out complicated weave structures, and the science behind the different fibers which make up yarn and are woven into fabric.

I remember hanging out with an old art school friend, and trying to describe why textile design was such a good fit for me.  I described how sometimes designs are very complicated or have deep concepts behind them, and sometimes just an orange scribble is enough.

When I started working for Jhane almost a year ago, I found her to be creative and artistic, and also inspired by mathematics and algorithms.  In fact, Jhane employs mathematicians who write her exclusive proprietary software which we use to generate abstract geometric designs.

Working with Jhane, I have discovered my inner computer nerd.  I have learned to use so many new graphics programs.  We’re using software that no one else in fashion is using like fractal software, mathematical generators, and 3-D animation software. We’re even beta testing brand new software as well.  I still love Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and I’ve looked to other industries to find alternative ways to use these programs.  Since the main focus of our sportswear line is shirts, I took a pattern-making class to learn how a shirt is constructed.  By the way, there is a lot of math and geometry involved in pattern-making.

This is a sneak peek at a engineered digital print for Spring 2010—a tribute to the "orange scribble".

A lot of the skills that I learned as a fine artist are transferable to textile design.  For instance, even in menswear, it is important to know how to draw flowers traditionally, before you can draw flowers abstractly.  Color is the first thing that people notice, and if it’s not pleasing to the eye or flattering, it doesn’t matter how well a garment fits or how innovative the fabric.

We just finished designing our Spring 2010 line, which was loosely inspired by grafitti and painting.  Some of these shirts were actually approached in the same way that I would make an abstract painting, with the exception that I used a computer to literally layer high resolution scans of paint strokes, drips and splatters, instead of real paint which is messy and toxic.  In fact, many art critics and mathematicians believe even the action paintings of Jackson Pollock are based on fractals.

-Heidi Bender, Assistant Designer at Jhane Barnes Menswear