Through sun, rain, wind, and snow, this is how the cycora® uniforms held up.
Material excellence means physical strength, versatility, and adaptability. Over the year, the CUE-Ts helped us to create a document of cycora®’s performance qualities in real time. They wore their uniforms while working with metal, sawing wood, painting large-scale murals on buildings, shaping clay, and firing kilns. These are notes from their transmissions.
Echo: Welding has created a lot of wear, many burns and holes, and dirt build-up, but after some modifications, the uniform is still holding strong.
Bravo: The fabric is very durable and soft for every day use—great for dirty work like repairing machines, or painting.
Delta: Layers of wood glue, and sawdust have piled up. No holes, or signs of weak fibers.
The secret lives of clothes: What we wear becomes a part of who we are.
The physical learnings of project CUE-T proved the material strength of cycora®. But the 9-month mission taught us something immaterial as well. Our relation to the clothing we choose to live with matters; our clothing takes on memory and character with every experience it shelters us through, with every wear and every wash. As there is value between the relation of our Earth and the materials we take from it, there is value in the memories our clothing carries—and the way that it ages with us.
“My relationship with my uniform is equally intimate and unobtrusive; which is exactly how I think a uniform should be,” CUE-T November told us. “I put it on before going into the studio and don’t give it a second thought, which in my eyes, is a good sign of a well-fit, well-considered piece of clothing.
On his relationship with his uniform, Bravo said “Like an artist’s smock, the uniform has been an awesomely consistent piece of my studio practice. There is great value in having a consistent uniform that I know will always perform for me when I need it. And knowing that the material is a more sustainable fiber makes wearing it all the better.”
From ‘waste’ to uniform, from uniform to future clothing.
Naturally, the uniforms look a bit different than they did when they were new, after almost a year of continuous wear through the adventures of the lives of artists. And yet the CUE-Ts found that they had astounding qualities of physical durability and resilience. Although the artists are no longer officially CUE-Ts, they will continue to wear their cycora® uniforms beyond the project’s end. When the uniforms eventually reach their natural end-of-life, they will be sent back to us for another cycle of regeneration. From there, their stories will live on in the molecules that make up future cycora® fabric to come.
