Hard.clo

Hard is a project with strong statements written in Cyrillic alphabet.

Hard goes beyond ordinary fashion ideas with a limited unisex collection.

Hard create a new language , strong and wild like our word .

Its not just a T- Shirt , is white T-shirts with your expressions on the front .

Cause every T-Shirt has its story to tell .

It’s hard being an immigrant in Greece. Nevertheless, thousands of people have made Athens their home in recent years, either as economic migrants or refugees fleeing war zones in Africa and Asia. A new visual project by young Athens-based fashion stylist Yiorgos Mesimeris called Hard.clo touches upon issues of migration, nationality and identity by mixing up cultural references in a series of plain white T-shirts emblazoned with vinyl-printed mottos. What makes the Hard.clo T-shirts unique though is that they carry English words transliterated in Cyrillic script. This writing system was invented in Bulgaria centuries ago, and is used today as the basis of many alphabets—more famously those of the Slavic languages like Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian and so on, but also for many non-Slavic languages such as Mongolian, Tatar, Kazakh, and even for early alphabets of Yupik, the language of Alaskan Eskimos.

The arrival of immigrants and their ghettoization in the city centre is mostly seen as a problem. Although you can experience different cultures in the streets of Athens, in reality we blatantly ignore them. HARD seeks to express thoughts and feelings that are found in these situations; it listens to, records and reproduces their sounds. Trying to fight back ignorance and fear through fashion and pop culture is one of the main mechanisms we have in our hands to make a step forward.