Nendo's New Issey Miyake Store: Skewering Fashion

http://www.fastcompany.com/1652091/nendos-new-issey-miyake-store-skewering-fashion

BY SUZANNE LABARRETue May 25, 2010

Ultra-thin, steel-rod displays are part menacing, part "prairie grass."

Last year, we told you about Nendo's ultralight mobile display furniture for some inexpensive(ish) Issey Miyake stores in Tokyo. Six months on, the disgustingly talented Japanese design firm unveils a new concept: Fashion on pins and needles.

The displays -- for a shop in Tokyo's ur-trendy Shibuya area -- are designed to show off Miyake's Bilbao bag, an unstructured little confection that doesn't hang so much as it settles into place. So rather than produce a hard, squat plinth for something that's anything but, Nendo whipped up these rail-thin steel rods, each varying slightly in height; in Nendo's telling, they resemble "a field of prairie grass."

 That or something you could prick your finger on. (Each rod is a little more than a quarter-inch thick -- too wide, we assume, to do much damage.)

The bags fall over the rods willy-nilly, as if they were "flowers in a light breeze," to continue the Great Plains similie here. The shelving and hangers echo the rods.

Nendo's Oki Sato has inspired envy in the hearts of lesser designers everywhere for his play with lightness and illusion, turning chairs into ghosts and clothing hangers into wire-frame sculpture. Read more about him here.