CIMENT PLEATERS _

Pleaters. What springs to mind? Old ladies skirts, frumpy garments? I suppose that's from walking into charity shops and seeing bulk pleated shirts with a hideously ugly pattern that has put me off, but I think I've been converted. 
Ciment pleaters. The only pleaters left in Britain, they created garments for the queen amongst other people!  Amazing.
30? 40? So many samples placed across the table, these weren't your conventional pleats. 'Any paper fold you can create, however intricate it may be, and you can replicate it and slot it into one another, you can make a pleat from'. I was genuinely amazed at the wonderful array of beautiful pleats, the structure and form the produced.  The whole way through I was relating the designs back to my own work, thinking about the texture and how that represented what I was researching. The use of a pleated fabric in a garment would totally transform it, adding texture and structure that a normal fabric could never achieve. 
The process to make the pleated fabric was simple. Some of the accordion pleats were created by machine, but the more intricate pleats were created by hand. A piece of material is put between a pattern (a large piece of cardboard folded with the pleated design). Weights are put at either end, and then the material is forced into the folds as the cardboard is pushed down. It is then steamed to hold the pleats. I never believed something so wonderful could be created so easily.