Hosoo

From Hosoo’s 12th-generation Kyoto looms (founded 1688) to Koyori’s Tokyo debut (founded 2021), Japanese craft collaborations with western designers have spent the last eight years quietly inverting the catalogue model: the workshop is the fixed asset, the foreign designer is the variable, and the brief travels rather than the loom. The news event that anchors May 2026 is Craft x Tech Tokai, the second edition of Hideki Yoshimoto and Maria Cristina Didero’s programme, opening 30 May at Kudan House in Tokyo with six designers paired to six Tokai-region workshops; the streetwear-meets-Struer bookend is Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment Design x Bang & Olufsen pop-up at Isetan Shinjuku on 20 May, ten days before. Read together they sketch the working geometry of the form. ...

Three statements anchor Japanese design at Milan Design Week 2026: Junya Ishigami’s Vitra pavilion — 280 square metres held up by 47 hair-thin steel columns at Weil am Rhein — Theaster Gates’s Chawan Cabinet at Prada Home, Via Montenapoleone 6, and Toshiko Mori becoming, this April, the first woman to take the AIA Gold Medal for Architecture in the Institute’s 119-year history. Around those three poles, a denser map: Koyori’s Salone debut, Karimoku’s “A Thoughtful Stay,” Hosoo’s “Wave Weave” with Carsten Nicolai, Kengo Kuma’s rugs at the Crespi Bonsai Museum, Noritake at Alcova’s Baggio Military Hospital, We+ casting aluminium from foundry burrs at Galleria Rubin, Roberto Sironi salvaging kominka beams with Sansui at Rossana Orlandi, and Hideo’s plant-derived bioresin tubs in Pavilion 10. This is the lineage; this is the map. ...