Inside the Issey Miyake store in Milan, Reality Lab and Ensamble Studio present The Paper Log: Shell and Core, furniture carved from the compressed paper rolls left behind by the house's pleating machine.
Head designer Satoshi Kondo builds the collection around a quiet piece of studio waste: the cylindrical paper logs that form inside the pleating apparatus, where sheets of paper sandwich pre-cut textiles and take on their folds under heat and pressure. Normally recycled or discarded, the rolls carry the silhouettes of the garments they helped shape, printed onto their layers as pale imprints of sleeves, seams, and dye.
Kondo's idea arrived during a visit to the brand's manufacturer. The logs were treated as one might treat timber, carved, sawn, peeled, unrolled. Because the paper is absorbent, each piece was then soaked with wax or bound with glue to hold its form. Two cylindrical stools at the centre of the collection were cut crosswise by hand, their ends revealing a marbled swirl of cream, lavender, and soft pink that recalls the growth rings of a tree. They first appeared as seating at the Issey Miyake Spring Summer 2025 show in Paris.
The rest of the collection reads like a study in how a single byproduct behaves under different tools. A blocky armchair, its stacked pleated sheets banded by a white metal frame, shows the logs sliced flat and held in tension. A pedestal table carries a drum-shaped top over a column wrapped in crinkled paper brushed with cerulean. A bench rests a scooped, hollowed log on two stone-like blocks, its underside glazed in soft greens. A tall column is carved open to expose a painterly blue-and-ochre interior that looks closer to fresco than furniture.
"The wafer-thin pleated paper sheets give the furniture prototypes a distinctive texture reminiscent of wood and stone," Kondo told Dezeen. "Because of the randomness in how the sheets are compressed into the paper log, each resulting prototype is a unique, organic piece." The toolkit was deliberately catholic: chisels, traditional Japanese hand axes, heavy-duty craft knives, reciprocating saws, electric grinders, and a water jet cutter. Yellow masking tape survives in some surfaces as a kind of accidental drawing, a record of the pleating line now fossilised inside a chair.
Alongside the furniture, Ensamble Studio contributes pleated-paper sculptures that read the material at a different scale, closer to quarry than cabinet. Together the two bodies of work treat the paper log as something between a byproduct and a geology, beauty that Kondo calls "unintended", the crudeness of colour patches and bundled sheets held up as evidence of process. The Paper Log: Shell and Core makes a modest case that a fashion house's offcuts are already halfway to being chairs.
