Runways to restaurants

A Milan restaurant just turned last season’s catwalk into wall paneling and a bar counter. OOOH Studio says Nino – Osteria con Cucina was built with timber salvaged from a decommissioned Milan Fashion Week runway instead of hiding that origin. (urdesignmag.com)) Nino sits on Via Nino Bixio 47 in Porta Venezia, and it opened as a new osteria from the team around chef Diego Rossi, who is best known in Milan for Trippa. The room was designed less like a polished dining set and more like a place where the previous life of each material stays visible. (reportergourmet.com, (urdesignmag.com)) OOOH Studio filled the interior with other found pieces too: vintage lamps, recovered wood, jazz records, and Italian posters from the 1970s. The effect is closer to walking into someone’s edited memory than into a new-build restaurant with matching furniture. (urdesignmag.com), archiproducts.com) That same reuse logic is now showing up a few streets away in fashion’s own design calendar. Issey Miyake will present “The Paper Log: Shell and Core” in Milan from April 21 to May 5, 2026, at Via Bagutta 12 during Milan Design Week. (dezeen.com, us.isseymiyake.com) The raw material is not decorative paper bought for a showroom. Issey Miyake says the project uses compressed paper rolls created as byproducts in its pleating process, where thin paper protects fabric as it moves through the pleating machine. (us.isseymiyake.com) Those rolls are big enough to behave like building stock instead of packaging scrap: the company describes them as about 80 centimeters high and 40 centimeters in diameter. Satoshi Kondo of Miyake Design Studio first cut them into stools for the Spring Summer 2025 Paris collection show, then kept pushing the material into furniture and installation work. (isseymiyake.com) For Milan 2026, the project splits into two parts with Spanish architecture office Ensamble Studio. “Shell” uses peeled paper shaped and hardened into sculptural forms, while “Core” turns the same source material into stool, chair, and table prototypes. (us.isseymiyake.com, dezeen.com) Put those two Milan projects together and the crossover gets very literal. A runway becomes a restaurant interior at Nino, and a garment-making byproduct becomes furniture at Issey Miyake. (urdesignmag.com), us.isseymiyake.com) Milan is the city where that move makes sense because Fashion Week and Design Week already share brands, studios, and audiences. What used to be backstage waste is being treated more like a material archive, with hospitality spaces and installations becoming the place where fashion shows its leftovers can have a second life in public. (archiproducts.com, dezeen.com, (urdesignmag.com))