The signature pleats in Issey Miyake’s system aren’t “designed” in the craft-and-romance narrative fashion loves to sell itself on. The clothes are cut, sewn oversized, then shoved into moulds and hit with heat and pressure until the folds basically get burned into the polyester. In other words, nothing is being figured out in production, it’s all already decided and just pushed into reality. What’s left though, apart from really beautiful clothes, is paper. Its sheets do the unglamorous job of separation and protection in the machine, before landing on a waste pile waiting to be recycled.
Luckily, those piles were in a flirty mood during Satoshi Kondo’s latest visit to the manufacturer. Responding to their material presence and cylindrical mass, Kondo started experimenting with them, which later fed into the installation and seating for the Spring 2025 show. Fast forward to Kondo and the Issey Miyake team bringing in Spanish architecture studio Ensamble Studio, who extended the idea into The Paper Log: Shell and Core project, on view during Milan Design Week (April 21 – May 5).
The name “Paper Log” (an 80 cm high and 40 cm in diameter roll), is borrowed from its tree-trunk-like structure, with marbled circles that mimic growth rings, “a suggestion of the passing of time in both a plant’s life and the pleating process,” as the house put it. “Shell and Core” splits the project into two opposing readings of the same idea, “ephemeral vs. concrete and delicate vs. robust,” again, in the house’s words.
The result is Ensamble Studio’s sheets, taken off the logs and stiffened into objects where every imperfection is frozen in place, and the in-house team’s stools, chairs, and tables, working the logs through wax, glue, and binding until they’re forced into something that can actually hold weight. All things considered, not a bad afterlife for scrap.
