HARD.CLO | Athenian urban initiative by Yiorgos Mesimeris : HARD to resist

Updated: Jan 15, 2019

I N T E R V I E W | By Deligina Prifti

They say that people are as diverse as their collection of T-shirts.

Indeed, never was a garment a more welcoming white canvas upon which to reflect our own stylistic, social and aesthetic preferences than the T-shirt.

Hard. Clo goes a step further and introduces a T-shirt that rather than mirroring the personal preferences of the one who wears it, it puzzles instead and says more about everyone else who sees it and tries to figure out its meaning.

And it is everywhere. We were lucky enough to interview its creator, the well-known stylist and fashion director Yiorgos Mesimeris who told us all there is to know about this new Athenian urban initiative.

D. P. Mr. Mesimeris, what is the story behind the name Hard.clo;

Y. M. Hard.clo is not a typical brand, I would call it a project. An experimentation rather between creativity and fashion. The initial thought was the creation of bold images that would depict contemporary reality through a raw prism. An extension of this thought born the idea of the T-shirts. Hard.clo is an amalgam of letters, languages and cultures.

"Taking the Cyrillic alphabet as a starting point,

I am trying to depict a new world. "

What fascinated me was the optical illusion of this alphabet. because at a first glance it linguistically looks as close to Russian as well the Greek orthographic systems. The truth of course is that it stands independently far beyond both of them. What you read in each T-shirt are essentially the anagrams of English phrases to Cyrillic renditions.

D. P. Why did you choose to express yourself through the minimalism of the T-shirt?

Y. M. The T-Shirt acts as a canvas mirroring my conceptual experiments, whilst holding a sense of their minimalist nature.

D. P. " Every T-shirt has a story to tell". Do you make reference to the countless moments in a person's life when he experienced great emotions and events just when wearing a T-shirt? In the end why do we get so attached to our T-shirts?

Y. M. Τhe concepts of freedom, survival, diversity, are the corpus across this narration which I named Hard. These universal concepts are being apprehended differently according to each individual personality that wears them. I stand by the notion that the boundaries of your language are the boundaries of your universe.

"Finally, my line addresses people that are in touch with their humanity.

100% human, as I like to say."

D. P. Each line is embossed with words written in Cyrillic script. Did you use that language because of its widespread use throughout several Slavic countries?

Y. M. I am deeply influenced by the culture of the Balkans and particularly their dynamic and unapologetic sense of fashion. This particular alphabet, aka the Cyrillic, drew my attention because in its written form it bears a lot of resemblances to the Greek one, but at the same time it is massively different. I see it as an eclectic calligraphy.

D. P. In your opinion does fashion unite people or set them apart?

Y. M. In reality, fashion is a multidimensional phenomenon projecting society's tendencies and orientations at a particular historical moment in time.Its role is to introduce to society new behavioral and moral ideas, using quick and effective methods of communication and integration. Τhe ethical models that each one of us chooses to follow and stand by throughout our lives vary upon our character, our personality, our notions and ideas, our values and mind-sets, our group of friends, the vital moral and social messages that our family and those closest to us have nurtured us by, but most importantly our own judgements and perceptions of the truth.

D. P. How do you envision hard.clo in the future?

Y. M. As a brand that keeps evolving through constant exposure to multiple stimuli.

D. P. A wish for 2019.

Y. M. Unconditional love

We thank Yiorgos Mesimeris.