Fashion designer Issey Miyake commissioned industrial designer Oki Sato to create the Cabbage Chair as part of an exhibition about envisioning new, sustainable production practices. Sato, who heads the design firm nendo, is renowned for the deceptive simplicity and effortless elegance of his products, following in the tradition of such minimalist Japanese designers as Naoto Fukasawa and Sori Yanagi. Sato was given the paper remnants from the process of making Miyake’s celebrated Pleats Please clothing. The paper, strengthened with resins, protects the fabric while it is heat-pressed, then rolled into cylinders and discarded. By stripping successive layers of the paper from the cylinder, much like cabbage leaves are peeled to the core, Sato created a comfortable chair (although ultimately he needed a stronger material to make full-scale, structurally integral seating). Several chairs were made for the XXIst Century Man exhibition at 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo in 2008; this example is from a subsequent edition of forty chairs commissioned by Friedman Benda Gallery for the 2009 exhibition nendo: ghost stories.
Bobbye Tigerman
2013
