At Pleats Please Issey Miyake‘s first pop-up store in Milan, the sky has been turned upside down: the blue is on the floor, the clouds are the furniture, and six shades of the Japanese label’s new series hang along a single curved rail as one continuous gradient. Open at 10 Corso Como until October 11, the temporary space is the first stop of a four-country rollout that will carry Azure Colors to Shanghai, Bangkok and Tokyo. What looks like a playful set is a close translation of how a Pleats Please garment works, since none of it takes its final shape until air and a body move through it.
A room of soft volumes replaces the conventional shop fit-out. White quilted panels curve around the walls like oversized cushions, display tables rest on lobed white bases shaped like clouds, a rounded seat sits on the floor like one that drifted loose, and underfoot the ground is a saturated cobalt blue. According to the brand, every Azure Colors venue is meant to offer “a space that feels as if you are floating in the sky.” In Milan, that means looking down into blue and around at white.
Six blues on one rail carry the collection. Called Pale White, Pale Blue, Azure Blue, Middle Blue, Deep Blue and Navy Blue, the shades are hung in sequence along the curved rail, so the Azure Colors series reads like a sky lightening from one end of the room to the other. The range is compact: two tops, two dresses, two skirts and one pair of trousers, plus a large and a small stole, all available in every shade and designed to be worn alone or layered across the gradient.
Pleating after sewing is the technique that gives the room its logic. Each Pleats Please piece is sewn first and pleated afterwards, a reversal of the usual order that sets the pleat permanently into the finished garment rather than into the fabric. This approach to garment pleating is what makes the clothes light, easy to wear and machine washable, and why the silhouette only fully exists in motion. The installation borrows the same principle, with surfaces that look inflated rather than built.
From a 1988 experiment to a label of its own, the pleat has been the house’s longest-running line of research. Pleat studies first appeared in the ISSEY MIYAKE women’s collection in 1988, and Pleats Please launched as an independent brand for Spring/Summer 1994. The same interest in treating a textile process as the design itself runs through the house’s more recent work, including the 3D-knitted iPhone Pocket developed with Apple.
The Corso Como storefront gives little away from the street. Two blue awnings carrying the Pleats Please logo sit within the ivy-covered facade of one of Milan’s most recognizable addresses for fashion, art and design, and through the windows the white padded walls and blue floor read almost like a single colored field. For a brand opening its first pop-up store in Milan, the choice keeps the intervention small on the outside and total on the inside.
A mirror interrupts the curve at one point in the room, paneled into the same white padding as the rest of the wall, easy to miss until it doubles the gradient rail behind it. Where the reflection takes over, six blues start to read as something closer to twelve, and the cobalt floor continues past the point where it should stop.
The paper behind the pleat offers a counterpoint across town. In April, during Milan Design Week, the Via Bagutta flagship hosted The Paper Log: Shell and Core, which turned the compressed paper rolls that protect fabric in the pleating press into furniture and objects. Satoshi Kondo of MIYAKE DESIGN STUDIO said the aim was to create something “for the ease and poetry of everyday life, as Miyake intended” when he founded Pleats Please. That show exhibited what the pleat leaves behind, while Corso Como shows the lightness it produces. Azure Colors is also sold at the Via Bagutta store until October 11.
Milan goes first in a rollout staged across four countries. After the Corso Como opening on September 10, a pop-up at Shanghai’s West Bund Central opened on September 21, while Central Chidlom in Bangkok and the Pleats Please store in Tokyo’s Aoyama follow on October 1, each with its own sky-inspired retail installation. Milan remains the only European venue, with online sales limited to the ISSEY MIYAKE Europe store, where the series’ dresses are listed at €310 and €450.
At the palest end of the rail, the Pale White pieces all but dissolve into the quilted wall behind them. Everywhere else in the room the gradient is easy to follow, blue against white, garment against cloud. Only there, where the lightest pleats meet the softest panels, does it become hard to tell where the clothing stops and the set begins.
Azure Colors Pop-Up by Pleats Please Issey Miyake | Where: 10 Corso Como, Corso Como 10, 20154 Milan, Italy — When: September 10 – October 11, 2026