ARE YOU HARD ENOUGH?

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.