What’s Happening: One of the Japanese designer’s most innovative textile techniques debuts in the U.S. with a multitude of styles and patterns reflective of technological leaps forward.

The Download: Issey Miyake believed he accomplished everything he could by 1988 when the Musée des Arts Decoratifs staged a retrospective of his prodigious ready-to-wear. But the ideas kept coming. Four years later, the late Japanese designer invented Pleats Please, his label’s signature technique, in which polyester fabric folds like an accordion to resist wrinkles. It foreshadowed the A-POC (“A Piece of Cloth”) technique in 1998, in which textiles are programmed with imprinted finished patterns. Wearers follow instructions to cut out seamless garments, eliminating the textile waste typical of regular manufacturing.

Revolutionary at the time, the idea is now receiving an update with new technology thanks to Yoshiyuki Miyamae, a longtime Issey Miyake designer who previously helmed the label’s runway collections. It’s being rebranded as A-POC ABLE, the “able” nodding to how new techniques allow one piece of cloth “to become anything—it’s limitless,” Miyamae tells Surface through a translator at the label’s Tribeca boutique, where the collection will be on view today through May 5 in an exhibition about the brand’s origins and evolution. A multitude of styles are on display, illustrating the technique’s capabilities and hinting that more innovation is afoot, perhaps in fields beyond fashion. Type-A is made by cutting tube-shaped fabric with scissors; Type-O incorporates a variety of 3-D pleat shapes for a textural interplay; Type-P prints patterns in layers on a fabric whose glue expands with heat.

To illustrate A-POC ABLE’s potential to create innovative garments, the label teamed up with Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino. They recently debuted a capsule in which his city collages are reconstructed on pants and coats using A-POC ABLE’s jacquard weaving technique. Miyamae found kinship in Nishino’s practice of photographing urban life. “It takes so much time to take these photographs and turn them into one piece,” Miyamae says. Nishino develops them, prints them in the darkroom, and cuts his contact sheets over six months, which Miyamae likened to weaving a piece of cloth. “It resonates with how I make things.”

In Their Own Words: “Our designers are working with researchers, technologists, doctors, and other professionals to discuss ideas to make these garments,” Miyamae tells Surface. “There are so many prototypes.”

Surface Says: We recommend swinging by Issey Miyake’s Tribeca boutique to see a textile steaming demonstration that turns cloth into wearable sculpture in seconds.

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Like clockwork, spring encourages even the most indoorsy among us to reflect on planetary wonders in the face of a new season. In that spirit, the modular architecture experts of Room recently doubled down on their commitment to the Earth by partnering with One Tree Planted. For every Room purchase, the company will work with the organization to replant deforested swaths of land.

If the cinematic hotels that Xavier Donnelly dreams up as creative director for the design firm Ash are any indication, he loves to translate his global travels into memorable spaces viewed through the lens of the past. Though a painterly approach defines the firm’s layered interiors, his actual paintings have enjoyed a smaller audience. That’s soon to change thanks to Backdrop, the Schumacher-owned paint brand founded by husband and wife Natalie and Caleb Ebel. They recently joined forces with Donnelly to launch a four-piece wall coverings collection drawn from his travels to ancient sites in Italy and the vivid fresco-like paintings they inspire.

The view over the horizon of Farasha Farmhouse is an exquisite one: a swath of olive groves surrounds the walled compound formerly owned by painter Patrice Arnaud. Now, the partners in business and life behind Boutique Souk, one of Marrakech’s glitziest event production companies, have refashioned it as an artistic escape in the shade of the city’s Atlas mountain range. Local firm Aire au Carré oversaw a sweeping update, adding a terrace, domed roof, and earthquake-proofing it in the process.

Within its newly stabilized walls, a prolific literary collection from Diana Vreeland proves to be a captivating draw for the creative types who might flock to its selection of intimate, well-appointed suites. Beni Rugs, LRNCE ceramics, and Bejmat tiles adorn each room and bath. The property’s real draw, though, is outdoors, where a nearly 150-foot lap pool fits neatly between two rows of olive trees that rustle in the desert breeze.

Quick, name a museum that’s open 24 hours and visited by more than four million people every day. You probably weren’t thinking of the New York City Subway, but a staggering 400 permanent artworks have been commissioned across the system over the past 40 years, earning it the moniker of “New York’s underground art museum.” More than 100 were completed in the past decade and now star in Contemporary Art Underground: New York MTA Arts & Design (Phaidon), a book that journeys across the city’s five boroughs to survey the blue-chip art by Nick Cave, Sarah Sze, Derrick Adams, and Yayoi Kusama that have made museum-quality experiences part of the daily commute.

When: Until July 26

Where: Galerie Kreo, Paris

What: The Spanish multihyphenate brings an array of vases, mirrors, engravings, and chandeliers to Rue Dauphine in an exhibition whose title captures the spirit of discovery and whimsy imbued in his distinctly Mediterranean collection of works. Hayon’s vases, for example, evoke a sort of spiritual succession to clay colored relics of Greek antiquity, while Murano craftsmanship adds an inimitable essence of heritage to his eclectic mirrors.

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Duplex is a New York–based design boutique engaged with the world’s most iconic design brands, groundbreaking talents, and master artisans, all of whom offer a surrealistic take on form and function. Its founder, Patrizio Chiarparini, brings a curatorial approach to Duplex’s roster with the goal of providing clients with a sophisticated, unexpected range of pieces.

Surface Says: Chiarparini goes the extra mile—literally—to offer one-of-a-kind design objects and exhibitions, making Duplex an international destination for those lucky enough to be in the know.

This bar dedicated to women’s sports is so successful that it plans to franchise.

Japan’s Kansai Airport hasn’t lost a single piece of luggage in three decades.

This shop in Bath recycles orphaned piano parts into materials for sculptures.

A tattooed influencer is busy knitting blankets in memory of his grandma.