Issey Miyake returns

Issey Miyake is showing furniture and paper structures in Milan from April 21 to May 5, not a runway collection, and the project sits inside the brand’s store at Via Bagutta 12 during Milan Design Week 2026. The installation is called “The Paper Log: Shell and Core,” and it was developed with the Spanish architecture office Ensamble Studio. (isseymiyake.com, dezeen.com) The material at the center is not fresh paper made for an art piece. It is a compressed roll of thin paper used inside Issey Miyake’s pleating process to protect fabric as it moves through the machine. (isseymiyake.com) Those rolls are big enough to read like building parts instead of scraps. Issey Miyake says each “paper log” is about 80 centimeters high and 40 centimeters in diameter, with a marbled cross section that looks like tree rings. (isseymiyake.com) Satoshi Kondo, a designer at Miyake Design Studio, first saw those rolls at a factory and treated them like timber instead of waste. He cut them into stools for the Issey Miyake Spring Summer 2025 show in Paris, where they worked as both seating and installation pieces. (isseymiyake.com) That earlier experiment turned a factory byproduct into an object. The Milan version pushes the same material further by asking what happens when you peel it, harden it, bundle it, soak it, or cut it at a larger scale. (isseymiyake.com) The show is split into two parts that explain the subtitle. Ensamble Studio made the “Shell” works by peeling paper from the logs, draping or wrapping it around forms, and then applying a hardener so the wrinkles and folds stay frozen in place. (isseymiyake.com) Issey Miyake’s own project team made the “Core” works as furniture prototypes. The brand says those pieces include stools, chairs, and tables shaped through processes like waxing, gluing, and bundling to test how much structure the material can hold. (isseymiyake.com) That is why this looks closer to architecture research than to merchandising. Ensamble Studio is known for work built around direct material testing, and Issey Miyake says the collaboration grew out of a shared focus on process rather than finished form. (isseymiyake.com) The timing also matters. Milan Design Week runs across the city from April 20 to April 26, 2026, around the Salone del Mobile fair, so brands use the week to show ideas that do not fit neatly into fashion shows or product launches. (comune.milano.it) Issey Miyake has been using Milan that way for a while. In 2025, its A-POC ABLE line used the week for a project with atelier oï that turned a single piece of cloth and wire into lighting, and the 2026 paper-log installation extends that same move from garments into interiors and spatial objects. (designboom.com, isseymiyake.com) So the return to Milan is not just a brand appearance. It is Issey Miyake using a leftover tool from pleated clothing production as a raw material for chairs, tables, and shell-like forms, and using design week to test whether a fashion process can scale into something closer to furniture and construction. (dezeen.com, isseymiyake.com)