AbstractThis work addresses the question of density of piecewise constant (resp. rigid) functions in the space of vector‐valued functions with bounded variation (resp. deformation) with respect to the strict convergence. Such an approximation property cannot hold when considering the usual total variation in the space of measures associated to the standard Frobenius norm in the space of matrices. It turns out that oscillation and concentration phenomena interact in such a way that the Frobenius norm has to be homogenized into a (resp. symmetric) Schatten‐1 norm that coincides with the Euclidean norm on rank‐one (resp. symmetric) matrices. By means of explicit constructions consisting of the superposition of sequential laminates, the validity of an optimal approximation property is established at the expense of endowing the space of measures with a total variation associated with the homogenized norm in the space of matrices.