People rarely think about the engineering of gala gowns, or of fashion at all. This is part of a larger problem of treating traditionally feminine interests as non-science-related. Baking is practical chemistry, knitting is manual programming, makeup is about crafting optical illusions, and adjusting pattern sizes relies on algebra.

But gala gowns never appear alongside the ubiquitous thrown baseball in physics books, or pop up as exam questions. As copyright library Nancy Sims pointed out to me on Twitter, while plenty of spacial reasoning tests ask which pieces fold into a cube, none ask which set of pattern pieces would fit together into a pair of pants.