Takashimaya turns unrecyclable suit parts into 3D-printed fixtures

Takashimaya's Suit Recycling Project turns collected suits back into fabric, but many components resist re-weaving and were heading for waste.

Unrecyclable suit fibers get mixed into 3D-printer plastic, and gravity shapes it: 'hanging print' drips structures between supports.

Since July 2025 D-lab and Joto Techno developed a PP filament blended with defibrated mixed fibers — less warping, a fuzzy fiber-borne texture — and D-lab's hanging-print method layers molten strands support-to-support into open, lightweight fixtures.

Fixtures and goods built this way furnish TRANSFORM YOUR SUITS pop-ups at Nihombashi (7–13 Oct) and Shinjuku (21–27 Oct 2026), next to the project's first commercialized recycled-fabric clothes.

Takashimaya's Suit Recycling Project already turns collected suits back into new cloth, but a suit is more than its shell: interlinings, linings and shoulder pads are mixed fibers that resist being re-resource'd into fabric. From July 2025, Takashimaya, Kyoto Institute of Technology's KYOTO Design Lab (D-lab) and 3D-printing materials firm Joto Techno ran joint research on putting those fibers to use as a new print material instead.

Joto Techno applied the material-design technology behind its JIZAI polypropylene to create a PP blended with defibrated suit fibers: warping during printing was suppressed while the surface gained a distinctive fibrous nap. D-lab then developed 'hanging print' — molten resin is extruded and allowed to droop under its own weight between support points, layering continuously into structures where fibrous strands seem woven together: highly porous, lightweight, and expressive of the recycled material's texture.

From 7 October 2026 the resulting 3D-printed fixtures and goods appear in Takashimaya's TRANSFORM YOUR SUITS limited-time shops (Nihombashi Takashimaya S.C., 7–13 October; Shinjuku, 21–27 October), displayed beside the first clothes commercialized from the project's recycled fabric — connecting cloth-to-cloth recycling to a second life in a different material and process. The builds name a student team and supervision by D-lab's Toshikatsu Kiuchi.

The hardest-to-recycle components — interlinings, pads, linings — became the feedstock instead of waste

Fiber blended into PP solves 3D printing's warping while giving surfaces a felt-like texture

Hanging print uses gravity as a forming tool, enabling porous structures conventional layer printing cannot easily make

The output reached stores within about a year, rather than staying a lab demo

The waste stream defines the material: design the manufacturing around what the input can actually do, and the constraint becomes texture.

The pop-ups ran 7–13 October at Nihombashi and 21–27 October 2026 in Shinjuku, with the printed fixtures and goods successively displayed and used; the project opens a second, non-textile route for the material that fabric recycling cannot take.