MUTED HARDWARE
Type
Industrial Design
Company
Yandex
Link
Team
(AD) Anastasia Tsirkina
(AD) Ekaterina Akerblom
(PM) Anastasia Valyuzhenko
Muted is a clothing brand built around considered minimalism and material quality. The brief for hardware was specific: buttons and a carabiner shouldn't just function — they should carry the character of the brand and stay in your memory after the garment does.
IDEA
Muted's clothing works through subtle hooks — poetic cues and small stories embedded into prints and construction details. The hardware needed to follow the same logic: everyday components that carry character without becoming loud. That led to exploring imperfection as a design driver — not randomness, but controlled wrongness. A tension in symmetry, a slightly off rhythm, a surface that feels almost right. Details you notice only after living with the piece.
PROCESS
Several directions were developed, each reading the collection's ideas differently. The final hardware brings a few of them together: ribbed surfaces, repeating wave patterns, and proportions that are slightly elongated — considered, but not perfectly resolved. Before anything went to the factory, prototypes were made for every direction and tried on actual garments. That's where proportions, tactility, and overall feel became clear.
OUTCOME
Buttons in a range of sizes, each with its own surface rhythm, and a carabiner in the same character. Ribbed surfaces, repeating wave patterns, proportions that are slightly elongated — a few directions brought together into one coherent set. Hardware that reads as part of the collection, not a detail added at the end.
