The Throwaway: On Paper, Permanence, and the Unlikely Architecture of Issey Miyake

 During Milan Design Week 2026, something quietly radical is happening inside the Issey Miyake flagship store on Via Bagutta. The Japanese fashion house, long celebrated for its hypnotic pleating technology, has turned its attention to what that process leaves behind: paper — enormous quantities of it, generated as a by-product and, until now, largely overlooked.

"The Paper Log: Shell and Core" is the fruit of a collaboration with Ensamble Studio, the Madrid-based architectural practice known for its meditations on material and mass. Together, they have asked a question that sounds almost naïve until you see the results: what happens when you treat paper not as a surface but as a substance?

The answer is a collection of prototypes that resists easy categorization. Issey Miyake contributes the "Core" — chairs, benches, and tables that are sturdy where you expect delicacy. Ensamble Studio offers the "Shell": moulded forms and lampshades hovering somewhere between architecture and artifact. What unites them is the paper itself — finely layered yet raw, permeated with soft traces of rainbow-toned marbling — which turns out to be a far more complex protagonist than its reputation would suggest.