Issey Miyake's paper show

Issey Miyake has turned waste paper from its pleating process into a Milan Design Week installation and a set of furniture prototypes. (wallpaper.com) The project, called “The Paper Log: Shell and Core,” opened on April 21 at the brand’s Milan flagship at Via Bagutta 12 and runs through May 5. It was conceived by Satoshi Kondo of Miyake Design Studio with the Issey Miyake project team and Spanish architecture office Ensamble Studio. (eu.isseymiyake.com, dezeen.com) The raw material is a compressed roll of wafer-thin paper used in Issey Miyake’s garment pleating process. Instead of sending those rolls straight to recycling, the team treated them as building material for sculptural forms, surfaces and seats. (wallpaper.com, dezeen.com) “Shell” and “Core” describe two different ways of working with the same paper log. In one, the paper is unrolled and fixed into hardened, shell-like surfaces; in the other, the dense cores are compressed and assembled into furniture prototypes. (milandesignweek.org, milandesignweek.org) The show lands during Salone del Mobile and the wider Fuorisalone circuit, when fashion labels use Milan’s design week to test ideas outside clothing. This year’s Issey Miyake installation sits inside that crossover, but it stays close to the house’s long-running interest in pleating, process and material research. (wallpaper.com, msn.com) That focus on process is specific to the brand’s history. Issey Miyake’s clothing line Pleats Please became known for garments shaped through heat-set pleating, and the paper used to protect fabric in that system is the same byproduct now being recast as design material. (isseymiyake.com, dezeen.com) Ensamble Studio brings an architectural method to the collaboration. The Madrid-based practice is known for working directly with raw matter and construction logic, which helps explain why the installation reads less like a retail display and more like a materials lab. (eu.isseymiyake.com, ensamble.info) Coverage of the installation has centered on the objects that come out of that experiment: chairs, stools, tables and irregular sculptural pieces that keep the paper’s layered grain visible. Several reports also note a documentary element showing the making process inside the store. (dezeen.com, hypebeast.com, overstandard.dk) The result is a design-week project built from something usually hidden inside production. In Milan this week, Issey Miyake is putting that paper waste in the showroom and asking visitors to look at the process as closely as the finished object. (wallpaper.com, eu.isseymiyake.com)