Issey Miyake Inc. has opened a special exhibition at 21_21 Design Sight in Tokyo pairing its A-POC Able label with JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Possibilities of a Single Piece of Cloth, TYPE-XVII, opened on 21 October and runs through 19 November in Gallery 3 at Tokyo Midtown Garden.

The centrepiece is a pair of jeans woven on an advanced jacquard loom. Rather than printing an image onto fabric, A-POC Able built an Antarctic scene into the weave itself, varying the density of the threads to render light and shade. The source image was taken by Shikisai, JAXA's climate-observation satellite, and shows an ice sheet averaging roughly two kilometres thick, cut through by cracks that expose the dark blue sea beneath.

Alongside the jeans, the label developed a prototype fabric for future clothing, again drawing on the satellite image to explore new cloth structures. The research was supported by the University of Tokyo's Tomohiro Tachi Laboratory, which studies origami-based geometry. Issey Miyake said the underlying technique could extend beyond garments to interiors and building materials, and pointed to space and polar environments as future creative conditions for the research.

The company has stated no price, release date or retail channel for either the jeans or the prototype fabric, and both are presented as exhibition pieces rather than products. For a house built on a one-piece-of-cloth philosophy, the project keeps the whole creative chain - concept, satellite data and materials research - inside Japan, pairing a Japanese design house with the country's own space agency and a university laboratory. The show is closed on Tuesdays.