Designs on folk dress form an expression of artistic import within a culture. A 2017 ethnomathematics paper to which the authors contributed concludes that the designs on European regional folk dress are highly symmetric and analyzes the symmetry in the costume designs of 73 European cultures. Also examined are which symmetries are favored by, for instance, Catholic cultures or mountain cultures. In this article, two of the study's coauthors summarize its key points and go on to explore the neurophysiologic, aesthetic and ethnographic reasons why humans display symmetry on their regional dress.

In the village of Pirgí, on the Greek island of Chios, the façades of hundreds of buildings are completely covered with gray and white friezes. Circles, squares, triangles and rhomboids are used to create a lively geometry, ranging from the straightforward to the complex, to give each house its distinctive identity, its own unique face to display to the world. While analyzing the frieze designs, the authors discovered that the frieze artists intuitively obey a unique set of color-reversing rules. The goal of the project was to explain this powerful art form and to discover the essential mathematical structure underlying these color-reversing friezes.