Issey Miyake reimagines paper at Milan Design Week
by Gabriel Córdoba Acosta
Amid the restless rhythm of the Milan Design Week, where fashion increasingly asserts itself beyond the body, Issey Miyake delivers a proposition that feels both restrained and radical. The Paper Log: Shell and Core is less an installation than a quiet provocation, a study in how far material memory can be pushed before it becomes something else entirely.
Conceived by Satoshi Kondo in dialogue with Ensamble Studio, the project begins with what might otherwise be dismissed as industrial residue, compressed rolls of paper used in the house’s pleating process. Yet here, they are treated not as byproducts but as latent forms. Like tree trunks inscribed with time, their concentric layers hold a quiet record of transformation, only now that record is made visible.
The installation unfolds as a controlled tension between opposites. In Shell, paper is coaxed into a state of near weightlessness, peeled, shaped, and fixed into suspended gestures that feel almost accidental yet impossibly precise. They read like traces rather than objects, as if something has just happened or is about to. In Core, the same material is pushed in the opposite direction, compressed, treated, and stabilised into furniture whose presence is unexpectedly assured. A stool becomes monolithic. A table, improbably grounded.
What lingers is not simply the visual language, though the tactile irregularity, the muted palette, and the disciplined forms are all finely resolved, but the underlying proposition: that process itself can be a design language. That waste can hold structure. That fragility, when handled with rigour, can acquire permanence.
Rather than seeking spectacle, Issey Miyake offers something rarer, a moment of calibrated stillness in which material, time, and intention briefly align. And in that alignment, the ordinary becomes quietly extraordinary. It is the kind of project that does not ask to be understood immediately but stays with you long after you have left the room.
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