Fashion forward technology
Is the world of fashion due a tech upgrade? Futuristic design company Petit Pli certainly thinks so. Founder, Ryan Mario Yasin, is rolling up his sleeves and attempting to innovate the clothing industry’s most archaic traditions — starting with children’s clothes.
This is a fairy tale of fashion, function, and the future. About the creation of a magical fabric that, when you stretch it, collapses like origami undone, and, when you tense it, folds back into itself so satisfyingly it’s like solving a Rubik’s cube. It begins, very simply, with Ryan Mario Yasin returning home.
On New Year’s Day 2017, the 25-year-old design student had flown back to his native Iceland to meet his baby nephew, Viggo, for the first time. Shortly after his sister gave birth, Ryan had posted her a set of baby clothes as a gift. By the time they arrived he’d already outgrown them. “It was really annoying and it seemed like such a waste,” Ryan tells me in his studio in the London College of Fashion in Hackney, east London. “It also brought to light for me how fast children grow.”
At the time, Ryan was working on his dissertation for a design MA at the Royal College of Art in London, thinking about what he could do to make the fashion industry better, more ethical, even radical. “I was working on fast fashion at the time trying to work out a way to reduce our consumption,” explains Ryan “and I thought OK — if I can just focus on a niche problem like children then balancing commercial viability, desirability and sustainability all becomes much more easy to manage.”
In his luggage, Ryan had packed prototype material for an idea he’d had. He used it to stitch together a small pair of trousers, which he folded up and baked in the oven. When he took them out, and cooled them down, he tried them on Viggo and his toddler niece, Ronja. Such was the magic growing properties, the trousers fitted both baby Viggo and toddler Ronja. In that instant, Petit Pli was born.
In French, the name Ryan chose means “little fold” and it alludes to how all of his garments are constructed. Just as he had roughly proved in the kitchen oven, heating up folds, he explains, “organises the polymers within. When you heat up the fabric you can give it a memory, to remember what shape to go back into, because essentially it’s plastic. You’re deforming it into a certain state, so that when you cool it down, it wants to go back to that.”
To touch, it’s hard to believe that the first generation of Petit Pli children’s sports suits — which cost £120 for a set and are made to last a child not just for months but for years — are 100 per cent polyester. As I pull the fabric different ways, fascinated by this auxetic structure, Ryan adds, “the first prototype that we had last year, it had a very sticky feeling. But now we’ve come up with a blend that’s so soft to the touch and tactile.”
The material also has a water-repellent coating — for rainy days and accidental spillages — plus a highly durable ripstop structure which, according to its inventor, is “designed to make it last as long as possible: it’s reinforcement, so if a hole develops it won’t propagate.”
When at their smallest the suits fit a baby, but then continue to grow at pace with the child. Each trouser leg has a stirrup at the end, so the fabric cleaves and conforms to the child’s legs.
Eco-friendliness is at the core of what Ryan is trying to do with Petit Pli. One of the reasons his designs use polyester — in addition to its thermoset capability — is that it’s easily recyclable. Another is its durability. “In a 30-degree wash this should hold up pretty well for a long time,” he says. “We’ve even created a rig to fatigue test it in cycles — we’ve tested that to 60,000 cycles and that’s been fine. You do get a little bit of creep in the garments but it’s a matter of a centimetre, maybe a centimetre and a half, and since your child is growing it’s not going to be a major factor.”
If, despite all the Petit Pli design team’s best efforts, damage does occur, Ryan adds, “we’re even investigating using all the off-cuts from production — which causes waste in all fashion businesses — to make little patches. We’re really thinking about the whole product life cycle of this. We’re trying to educate people to properly care for your clothes. So, you’re reducing your energy consumption and negative effect on the environment.”
Visually, Ryan is already concentrating on how to work with “the architectural qualities” of Petit Pli with its special “3D-ness that you don’t get with other clothes” by investigating the use of colour. The plan is to create a range which has one colour on the warp and another on the weft so when they catch the light of the sun, there will be “totally different colours coming off in many different ways.”
When imagined like this, Petit Pli really does start to seem like something that ought to be in a sci-fi film — as if it’s a facet of our future even the mighty Philip K. Dick failed to foresee. Currently, Ryan’s team is talking to a factory in Portugal that “makes some of the most advanced clothing in the world” and he likes to think that, one day, the brand he has created will be shipped to and worn on Mars.
“It’s super futuristic which we love because we really are a brand of the future,” Ryan explains. “What we’re designing has to really touch those bases of performance and design. Say you were starting a colony on Mars, we believe that this would fit really well into that scenario because you’re not going to have someone sewing new clothes for the baby. You’re going to need clothes that grow.” He pauses and then adds: “Really, our aim is to clothe the future of humanity and so we’re just starting with the next generation.”
Yet, while Ryan aspires to alter the future, Petit Pli’s roots are in his past — in the origins of his mind and his boyish enthusiasms. Born in Reykjavik, with older half-siblings, he moved from Iceland to Lebanon before settling in London when he was 12 years old. Entrepreneurism is in the blood. “My dad is very much an entrepreneur,” he says. “He’s done anything and everything from working in travel agencies, having a restaurant, to developing property in London. He’s like a chameleon and my mum has always worked with him and alongside him supporting him.”
As you might have guessed, he is keen on origami — “I was obsessed with manipulating materials” — and fashion — “I like to think about the way I dress and convey myself to others”. He first went to university to study aeronautical engineering at Imperial College London. It was here that he learned how vital prototypes are to the design process.
“My dissertation there was focused on deployable structures for nano-satellites,” Ryan recalls. “What that meant was trying to fit as many solar panels into a 2-millimetre gap as possible, which required using MOD carbon fibre, state-of-the-art stuff.” He gets up to retrieve a cardboard box from above our heads and opens it to retrieve his original working model. “I devised a way of doing that — a super rough prototype — and it just goes to show how important making a really quick and terrible sketch in real life helps in the design process.”
He takes out what looks like a chopped-up steel tape measure and continues: “What I’m about to show you, which is just awful, is the same as the oven-baked garment — which also looked terrible, but was the first minimum viable product which translated that idea I had in my mind to something physical that people would comment on and input their ideas into.” With a satisfying thwack the prototype snaps out and extends — as his imaginary solar panels might. Even though we’re sitting in a room full of children’s clothes and fabric offcuts — it’s exactly the sort of inspired solution to a problem you can imagine Matt Damon coming up with if he had such difficulties in The Martian.
But aeronautical engineering didn’t satisfy Ryan’s creative urges and he started to look “across the road” at the Royal College of Art and their programmes — which combined design with engineering. “As soon as I saw the programme I thought it was for me,” he says. “I wanted to solve problems in a creative way using art, design, physics and maths together.”
Plans for Petit Pli first began to unfold when Ryan went to study abroad in Tokyo for six months. “It was when the work of Issey Miyake was put in front of me. It was incredible. I could see his work in a museum as a piece of art and outside on the streets as a functional garment being worn and used by people every day. I liked that correlation between art and function.”
He began to think how to manipulate fabrics and embed secret structures in them. He was particularly fascinated by the Harajuku community in Japan who, he explains, are “sort of like Camden punks. They’d be dressed up in a really funky way” but while they were on public transport, “other people would isolate them and look at them badly.” So Ryan created a garment “which would theoretically be worn round the neck” that was black and would look unremarkable which, as soon as they arrived at their destination, would deploy using “shape memory alloys to sort of actuate and grow and blossom to reveal stickers and decoration. They could customise and apply this — which is a huge part of their culture.” The only downside was that it was quite niche.
Instead, he began asking much bigger questions — about fashion itself — how it changes with each season and how the industry consumes itself. “I started looking at the fashion industry because I knew I wanted to be in it but I saw that it was really wasteful and unethical and I thought rather than make a new design I want to actually tackle big issues and use my skills to fight them.”
He began mapping out the industry and noticed that even “good” fabrics have a profoundly negative impact on the environment. For instance, organic cotton: “you think that it is good, if you’re buying cotton. But the way it’s harvested, the mass volumes, the amount of water…it ruins the land.”
For Ryan, “the real thing was changing people’s psychology. To slow down and stop consuming so many clothes. And that was what I wanted to tackle. I came up with six concepts, one of which was “one size fits all”. That has now become Petit Pli. His original idea was to target the next generation — to teach them to reduce their consumption. It just seemed the best project to take forward and that’s what I spent most of my time developing.”
And that’s how we return to the start — with the first-ever prototype, which Ryan baked in the family oven on 1 January 2017.
This is where the fairy tale really begins. Believing that the idea he’d hit on was special, Ryan entered Petit Pli for the 2017 James Dyson Award. He recalls being nervous, admitting: “I submitted the night before because I just kept looking it over and iterating it and reiterating. I never thought it was perfect until the deadline had come and I said: ‘OK, just get it done.’”
After his final degree show at the Royal College of Art, footage of Petit Pli went viral. “Especially in South America it was really popular — Brazil, Chile, Mexico,” Ryan explains. Then, to top it all, “I got a call from Dyson saying that we’d won the national prize in the UK. It has opened up so many opportunities. It’s just basically given us so much exposure, and to have that approving seal means we’ve been taken way more seriously by investors. It’s helped us in so many ways.”
Part of what’s revolutionary about Ryan’s work is his tech-focused approach to fashion. “I think all clothing is a second skin to us,” he explains. ‘It’s probably the most intimate product we have. The closest thing to our bodies, literally.” But while every year, technology companies seem to make giant leaps forward with the latest iteration of their devices, fashion is, Ryan believes, stuck in the past and refusing to adapt. “The rest of the world is really moving forward and stepping up in technology, yet we’re still making clothes in the same, archaic way that we did many years ago,” he explains. “Why are our clothes not keeping up with that advancement in technology?”
Of course, Ryan’s clothes are. And, somewhat ironically, Petit Pli intends to prove how radical it is by sticking with its current form and not changing every season. “We have a lot of ideas which I can’t go into too much detail about but if you want a timeless classic you kind of have to stick to your guns and I think we have to maintain that integrity. We’ll obviously always analyse colour trends but our focus is to make classic pieces.”
So many different labels seem to apply to Ryan and what he has achieved with Petit Pli — he’s a designer, an engineer, a start-up founder, an entrepreneur. So how, ultimately, does he see himself? Above all, like the man whose award he won last year, Ryan is an inventor. He says, “I always wanted to make something that people would say: ‘Oh, why didn’t I think of that?’ I really did and I finally have.”
And as for the niece and nephew who inspired him to sew them tiny suits and cook them in the oven? “They’re super proud — my sister is. They were the starting point for this whole project. It’s really an homage to them.”
Words: Emily Hill
Read more stories from on: at on.dyson.co.uk and follow on: @dyson_on
