In my college years, when the plan was still that I would become a mathematician, a bearded friend with the aura of a false philosopher mentioned a text in passing, a text that had tried to demonstrate that behind every natural variation, behind any difference, a single pattern existed. A kind of primary form. For a while I forgot his comment, until two winters later when a different friend—my roommate, a terribly hygienic man who wouldn’t travel without a bar of soap in his pocket—mentioned to me that a certain Thomas Browne, a melancholic man who was born and died in the baroque seventeenth century, had suggested in a posthumously published work that nature and culture came together in the repetition of a five-pointed shape called the quincunx. It reminded me of my first friend, his beard and his airs of a false prophet, and I headed for the library. It took me a while to find the book I was looking for. Someone had put it in the wrong place and it had ended up in the cartoon section—the librarian told me—alongside Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry, lost among Walt Disney’s first sketches. So I went to the cartoon section and there, among those little drawings that have given so much fodder for conversation, I found an old edition of the book. The work in question was The Garden of Cyrus, originally published in 1658, twenty-four years before the author’s death. My friend had been wrong: it was the author’s last book before he died, not a posthumous publication. However, both of my friends had gotten one thing right: the idea of the prevalence of the quincunx pattern in nature as proof of divine design. On the cover I found the portrait of a small man with deeply large, red, and sad eyes; a pointed beard; and long hair. I remember thinking that Thomas Browne himself was a little like a blend of my two friends painted from memory. I didn’t linger, though, over that impression. I paged quickly through the old edition until I found the shape. It was a kind of starfish, a geometrical butterfly that instantly awakened my interest. I picked up the book, checked it out with the librarian, and took it back to my dorm room. I remember how my roommate denied any resemblance to the melancholic Englishman.
Fifteen years later, after much reading and an unexpected career change, my obsession would end up producing a series of articles that I was more satisfied with than proud of. Among them, the least well-known was a history of the permutations of the pattern in tropical butterflies, a brief article called “Variations of the Quincunx Pattern and Its Uses for Tropical Lepidoptera,” of which the British journal The Lepidopterologist had published a short excerpt under the more exotic title “The Quincunx and Its Tropical Repercussions.” I remember that I started the article, solely on a whim, with a beautiful quote from Browne himself: “Gardens were before gardeners, and but some hours after the earth.” Even today, when I read that article, I’m surprised to find that quote there, like a superfluous translation lost inside another one, necessary and relevant. For some reason I still haven’t figured out, it was that little article that managed to catch the attention of a fashion designer whose name I knew in passing but of whose work I knew little. Even without opening them, I know: the three envelopes I now have in front of me are a kind of testament to a collaboration that started with a simple phone call.