The pleat, in hard form

A pleat is a fold that has been taught to stay. Pressed into cloth with heat and time, it gives a flat length of fabric a rhythm of light and shadow, and lets it move without losing its shape.

PLISSÉ asks what happens when that rhythm is carried over into a hard, small object you hold every day.

From fold to flute

Cloth folds; a case cannot. So the pleat becomes a flute: a shallow, concave groove with a rounded floor, cut into a flat back. At the Signature depth each flute is 0.6 mm deep and three millimetres from the next. That is not much, but under a low light it is enough for every flute to throw a hairline of shadow, and for the back to read as pressed rather than moulded.

The pattern is never raised. It is always carved into the surface, so the edges you hold stay smooth.

Where the pleats stop

The difficult part of any pleated garment is where the pleats end: at a waistband, a yoke, a seam. On PLISSÉ that place is the camera plateau. A flute that simply stopped there would look cut off. Instead, over the last fourteen millimetres the flutes ease out, growing shallower until the surface is smooth, the way fabric relaxes as it is drawn flat across a frame.

The same thing happens, on a smaller scale, around the halo, the smooth circle over the phone's wireless charging coil. The flutes part around it over three millimetres, so it sits in the folds like a pressed medallion.

Three depths

PLISSÉ is made in three intensities. Whisper is wide and shallow, almost a texture. Signature is the house pleat. Bold is deeper still, with lands that alternate wide and narrow, closer to a box pleat than a knife pleat. Each one is a different garment cut from the same idea.

Whichever you choose, the flutes are drawn from the same file we print, so the case that arrives is the case you turned on the screen.