Origami Bow Ties: Tessellations You Can Wear

Origami tends to get boxed into the “delicate” or “decorative” category, but I’ve always been more interested in its backbone. The structure. The way a flat sheet of paper can be engineered, folded, and persuaded into something that not only holds form, but lives in the real world. Especially when it’s worn.

That curiosity is what led me to origami bow ties and, more specifically, to tessellations. Most of these bow ties begin as a single sheet of paper covered in a repeating crease pattern. Tessellation folding is a slow, precise process: pre-creasing, collapsing, and refining the same movements over and over again until the surface transforms into something dimensional and textured. The folds are the design. Some pieces experiment with folding fan techniques, but it’s the tessellated structures where the paper really shows off what it can do.



Once folded, the paper stops behaving like paper. It holds tension like fabric, catches light at unexpected angles, and shifts subtly as the wearer moves. Put one on, and the same bow tie can read formal, playful, or quietly sculptural, depending on the scale of the pattern, the body wearing it, and the context it’s placed in.



Seeing these bow ties worn by different people over the years has been one of the most rewarding parts of the process. The repetition of the folds creates consistency and order, but the wearer brings individuality. The structure stays the same; the personality changes.



These pieces live somewhere between accessory and object. They aren’t trying to mimic traditional fabric bow ties. Instead, they’re an exploration of paper as a wearable, structural material, something strong, expressive, and a little unexpected, rather than fragile or purely decorative.



For those of you who follow along on my Instagram, you may have already seen this video from a while back. I recently shared a fun short clip on YouTube, showing several of these origami bow ties being worn, alongside a range of tessellation patterns that make each piece possible.

Working with paper this way, fold by fold, collapse by collapse, has also shaped how I think about technology and making more broadly. As conversations around AI and art continue to grow louder, I found myself reflecting on what folded, physical work reveals about the limits of automation.

If you’re interested in those thoughts, I explore them further in my recent post, Origami Art in the Age of AI.