The small-diameter, easily malleable, rattan used in the manufacturing of furniture, could probably be easily adapted to the contours of the human body. But Martha Beckman, one of my former Industrial Design students at RISD, chose a different path to construct her rattan dress: she decided to use a larger-diameter cane. Manau rattan, the material she used, is commercially available in the United States in diameters up to 2 inches (5 cm.). Unlike most bamboo species with hollow nodes, rattan has a solid cane. This circumstance favored a primitive, yet effective, process of deconstructing the rattan cane into a surface that could be molded to the contours of the body: smashing the cane with a hammer to break it down and separate the fibers. The hammer allowed the designer to easily fine tune the amount of force applied to disaggregate the fibers, as opposed to using mechanical machines such as a hydraulic press, that would afford a more homogeneous, yet less expressive, crushing process. By forcing the fibers to separate in order to re-arrange them following new patterns, she was able to generate a natural surface with different degrees of density, different thicknesses and curvatures. These three variables were enough to provide her with the design tools she needed for dressmaking. There is certain primitive sophistication in the result, even if it is just a prototype that speaks to the provocative notion of using an abundant grass as an innovative material to create new clothing concepts.
