Issey Miyake's Paper Log exhibition turned its pleated waste into furniture and sculpture with Ensamble Studio.
Every garment that carries Issey Miyake’s signature pleats leaves behind a piece of waste. Inside the pleating machine, sheets of wafer-thin paper sandwich the pre-cut textile and hold it steady under heat and pressure, and what comes out once the cloth is done is a dense cylindrical roll of spent paper, eighty centimetres high and forty across, printed faintly with the ghost of the garment it helped shape. Normally it goes to recycling. The roll almost resembling a felled tree, with its compressed sheets marbling into rings that stand in for the years a real log would carry.
Satoshi Kondo, a design director at Miyake Design Studio, saw something in the leftover paper rolls. On a visit to the brand’s manufacturer, he found the rolls stacked and waiting for disposal, and cut a few crosswise into stools – it was the first gesture to become The Paper Log: Shell and Core, a body of furniture and sculpture made with the Spanish architecture office Ensamble Studio, built entirely from byproduct materials.
Considered as furniture prototypes, the wafer thin pleated paper sheets each carry their own distinctive texture, an anomaly often found in marble or stone. Because the sheets are compressed randomly, each resulting prototype is a unique, organic piece.
‘Core’ is the furniture: prototypes carved, sawn, peeled and unrolled from the logs, then soaked with wax or bound with glue to hold a shape. Two cylindrical stools, cut crosswise by hand, open at their ends into a swirl of cream, lavender and soft pink. The pieces first appeared as seating at the label’s Spring Summer 2025 show in Paris. Other pieces include a blocky armchair of stacked sheets held flat in a white metal frame.
The tools to create the pieces was broad: chisels, traditional Japanese hand axes, heavy craft knives, reciprocating saws, electric grinders, a water jet cutter. In some spots, the pleating line survives with its yellow masking tape left on the surface, an accidental drawing fossilised inside a chair. Sitting alongside Core is a collection of items titled ‘Shell’ – Ensamble Studio’s contribution, which reads like stone. Peeled sheets are treated with hardening agents until every crease and wrinkle crystallises, frozen mid-movement into objects the studio has named for weather and landscape, Cloud and Lake among them.
Ensamble Studio was founded by Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa. The duo expresses that with Shell, the challenge was in finding a structure in a material that doesn’t have one. Paper sits at the far edge of that problem, about the least structure anything can have.
What the Paper Log demonstrates is something smaller and more durable than circularity: how arbitrary the line can be between a material called finished and a material called raw.
Issey Miyake has spent decades treating a single process, the pleat, as an entire design language; the Paper Log follows that process down to its discard pile and finds the language still running.
The Paper Log: Shell and Core, conceived by Satoshi Kondo of Miyake Design Studio with Ensamble Studio, showed at the Issey Miyake store on Via Bagutta, Milan, during Salone del Mobile 2026.
