The SHIKAKU at ISSEY MIYAKE SHINJUKU presents a special exhibition, “SLEEVES COLLECTION: Between Images, Presence, and Materiality” by ISSEY MIYAKE.

SLEEVES COLLECTION, presented for the ISSEY MIYAKE Autumn/Winter 2025/26 season, is a knitwear series composed entirely of sleeves in various materials and sizes. The concept originated from a study exploring “removing sleeves from their role as garment components and using them in solus to create an object.” True to the collection’s title,[N]either [N]or—alternating between “either or” and “neither nor”—the series challenges preconceptions about clothing, offering both freedom of wearing as a new aesthetic in the in-betweens. Inspired by this series, Teruhiro Yanagihara Studio began a project exploring how new value can emerge by connecting objects that have lost their function, serve no practical purpose, or are incomplete. They studied wood—the material that they work with every day—and gathered scrap pieces from timber processing, byproducts that fell outside production standards. Using traditional techniques of glassblowing and plastering, the studio cast molds of the weathered hollows (negative spaces) in the wood by pouring a fluid material that takes form in those spaces. Through these revealed voids, the wooden fragments are connected, generating a relationship between differing materials—a juxtaposed otherness.

These are not meant to be finished works, but rather Studio of each attempt—a creative inquiry within the concept of the series. Rather than rushing toward solutions, the work seeks infinite possibilities within the process itself, a process of questioning and ongoing exploration.

Like the ancient Japanese practice of 習作, a form linked-verse poetry in which two or more poets respond to each other by composing alternating upper verses (lines of five, seven, and five syllables) and lower verses (lines of seven and seven syllables) of a 短歌, this exhibition serves as a record of the ongoing open dialogue between ISSEY MIYAKE and Teruhiro Yanagihara Studio.