Guess what's hiding in Issey Miyake's new furniture?

Pia Seidel

20-5-2026

Translation: machine translated

Pictures: Pia Seidel

Issey Miyake is known for its pleated, sculptural dresses. At Milan Design Week 2026, the fashion house also showed furniture - made from a material you might not guess.

Some materials lie. Not maliciously, but in the best possible way: they look like something they are not. At Milan Design Week 2026, the house of Issey Miyake presented just such a surprise. But see for yourself if you can guess what this surface is made of.

Resolution

It's paper. More precisely: pressed waste paper from the production of Issey Miyake's famous pleated dresses, which previously simply ended up in the bin.

In the pleating process, wafer-thin sheets of paper are placed between the fabric to guide it through the machine. What remains afterwards are tightly compressed rolls of paper, known as paper logs. They look like tree trunks, complete with grain and «annual rings».

Chief designer Satoshi Kondo had the idea of treating them like logs: sawing, carving, peeling. Because paper absorbs well, it takes on wax or glue and becomes stable enough for furniture.

The texture is reminiscent of wood and stone at the same time, even though these are wafer-thin sheets of paper. And because the colours of the fabrics are transferred to the paper through heat and pressure during pleating, each piece contains the traces of a dress. As pale imprints of the garments that were once passed through the same machine. Kondo calls «a beauty that was not planned that way».

First the catwalk, then the apartment

Originally, Kondo had already discovered the paper logs for the Issey Miyake catwalk: he had the rolls cut open crosswise for the spring-summer 2025 collection in Paris. The cut surfaces with their grain served as seating and stage elements. Milan was the next step.

Sculptural paper objects were also created in collaboration with the Spanish architecture firm Ensamble Studio - the exhibition showed both sides of the material.

Substance instead of spectacle

At this year's Milan Design Week, many fashion houses presented installations - some of which were barely accessible without a VIP invitation or press pass. The design magazine Sight Unseen even spoke of a «final hype stage»: too many brand presentations, too few real design ideas. The Paper Log project was the opposite: no party, no spectacle - just pieces in an open showroom. It comes directly from production, solves a waste problem and speaks for itself. That was enough.

Have you guessed it - or did this material surprise you as much as it did me?

Pia Seidel

Senior Editor

Pia.Seidel@digitecgalaxus.ch

Like a cheerleader, I love celebrating good design and bringing you closer to everything furniture- and interior design- related. I regularly curate simple yet sophisticated interior ideas, report on trends and interview creative minds about their work.

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