Synapse... Body & Brain
a look behind the design
It has been far too long. I apologize. By far one of the craziest 12 month stretches that I have ever been on but alas I’d like to work this back into my routine… and there is no better way to do so than to just START.
Before the synapse print itself, just a word about how our process behind the prints we use and how we view them.
We spend as much time as we can looking outside the realm of fashion or apparel. The process usually starts by going down a research rabbit hole and seeing what’s at the bottom and more importantly, what parallels we find with performance, running, and sometimes, life. For the Mach it was heavily stealth aircraft. Mach speeds. Schlieren imaging. GPS heat maps.
This is by design. If your references are other people’s products, the ceiling on your work is a version of something that already exists. In things like physics or biology or engineering you have systems which are refined under constraint and in those constraints you get depth (which a product can inherit). The apparel becomes a carrier for an idea. The print acts more of a documentation of research.
Science turns out to be unusually good raw material for this, in part because so much of it concerns things that are true, false, or only observable for a split second. A theme that we keep going back to in our prints is the idea of the invisible force, made momentarily visible. A print can take something real that you could never otherwise look at, and give it a surface and with a surface you have the start of a story. This is our second print offering, after the mach, and like the mach, the goal is to carry some of our research and concept through the print itself.
Which brings us to the Synapse.
A synaptic cleft, or in layman’s, the gap where one neuron hands a signal to the next, is about 20 nanometers wide. Every movement you’ve ever made, at one point, started here. The moment where “Decide” becomes “do” happen here.
Training is, in a very literal sense, synaptic work. The repetitions that you do strengthen the connections that you use (long-term potentiation). You generally hear people call this muscle memory. The body follows where the synapses lead.
Both are printed on our Cirrus mesh base (which if you own anything Mach) you already know the hand feel.
The purple Synapse T and the white Synapse Tank (below), along with the accompanying collection (a core black CirrusMesh Tee, (2) new LinoCotton tees) release July 29th.
Questions? Comments? Feel free to drop them below
-Marcus
Huge potential for the (I assume already in motion) toques, here 🔥
> If your references are other people’s products, the ceiling on your work is a version of something that already exists.
While I agree here and think that solely looking to recreate or improve an existing thing creates a limiter (faster horse vs a car), I think a reference can serve to improve.
Not everything needs to start from first principles and a problem.
I also don’t think that ref necessarily is the worst thing. A lot of running belts were pretty bad for the longest time, and there were few options. Now we have more better ones, and even belted shorts. Solving for your specific problem that other people have is valuable, be it that it’s a style you want or a feature!
I think for patterns and graphics though which you discussed here it’s so easy to get influenced by what else is going on so it’s cool to see a deep dive, pick an area of interest and explore.
So far the graphic game has been on point!