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"It all began," says designer Oki Sato from his Tokyo office, "with an invitation to participate in an exhibition called 'XX1st Century Man,'" a show organized by Japanese pleat-meister Issey Miyake and focused on how people might live in the future.

It became a lot more than a group show invitation when the phone rang at Sato's design firm, Nendo, and it was the famed fashion designer, himself, on the line.

"Mr. Miyake gave me a phone call about his brand Pleats Please," Sato remembers, "and talked to me about what was on his mind.  In the process of making the pleats, he told me, there's a lot of garbage. The fabric is pressurized and pleated, and then a large amount of paper used to sandwich the fabric is thrown away. Twice as much paper as fabric is used and thrown away.

"We began peeling the roll of paper, as you would a vegetable. It became something like a chair or a harlequin stool, and we were able to sit on it."

"Mr. Miyake wanted some sort of furniture made to use this paper."

The quasi-reality-show aspect of the story, Sato says, is that "I have no idea why he chose me to call. I think I'd met him once at a party or something."  Clearly Miyake was aware of Sato's work, perhaps through his participation in the futurist exhibition. And just as clearly, this phone call was an honor of the first magnitude for a young designer with a firm of six people.

"We had a lot of discussions about how Mr. Miyake thinks about design," says Sato, "and about how we think about design" at Nendo. "We talked about how to treat the paper, this material for the furniture.

"And then we tried with different materials like using resin to make it solid, or mixing it with wood or steel. But it didn't work out well -- we weren't satisfied, nor was he.

"In the end, we thought about peeling the roll. We thought he might find something in that process. So we began peeling the roll of paper, as you would a vegetable. It became something like a chair or a harlequin stool, and we were able to sit on it.

"So we showed it to Mr. Miyake and he liked it. He had a concept in mind that matches an idea he has of future fashion, a philosophy about how people will one day shed things, like clothes.

"Mr. Miyake liked what we'd done and he named it Cabbage Chair."

Sato took a master's degree in architecture in 2002. "And at that point, I'd been educated to think in terms of, 'This is what you can do, this is what you can't.' A lot of tradition.

"But I went to the Milan Furniture Fair," a highly influential annual stop on the world's design-show circuit, "and I saw everybody designing so freely and the whole city was enjoying themselves. And I thought that I would like to design that way, as well.

"In Japan, things are divided so that architects design architecture, interior designers do interior design, and so on. At Nendo, we wanted to each do, say, one-fifth of a project instead of five people doing five different projects."

Crossing disciplinary lines for that "free" feeling in design, in fact, informs Sato's firm's name. "It means clay, very soft clay, a lot of range in what you can do in shape, size, color."

And today, Sato's group has a lot of new range, too. It turns out that the Cabbage Chair has become quite a good seat for Nendo. The group is working with the Naoshima island Contemporary Art Museum and Art Naoshima development led by Tadao Ando. And they're working on the Museum of Art and Design in New York.

"And we're working with Mr. Miyake on new concept stores," says Sato, "five new stores -- interior design, the graphics, the packaging, the total concept."

Designed by:
Nendo, Tokyo, Japan.

www.nendo.jp

Written by Porter Anderson