Ruitong Cui

Ruitong Cui is a London-based artist working with garment-based forms, wearable technology, and knitted textiles. Her practice explores relationships between human and non-human entities, reimagining garments as more than functional clothing. Her work investigates alternative forms of connection, care, and co-existence beyond human-centered narratives.

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INDEX

Breathing Companion
Manifesto
Previous works
Performance

Breathing Companion

Index

Fashion Film
Director: Ruitong Cui
Camera design: Xizhe Li, Qizhi Che
Editor: Xizhe Li
Actor: Amily
Make up: Joana Lopes Dialho

2025

[UAL Online Showcase]

Photo by Bofan
2025

This thesis aims to critique anthropocentrism and speciesism, utilising fashion design as a medium to predisposition to perceive animals a particular way in order to prompt critical reflection and challenges the user to see clothing not just as an object.

Through the creation of an interactive garment that mimics the presence and behaviour of a companion animal, the work challenges the assumption of human dominance in interspecies relationships. The garment responds to the wearer through subtle movements, breathing-like rhythms, and reactive behaviours, positioning itself not as a passive object but as an active, sensing entity.

Rather than serving the human body, the garment initiates a reciprocal relationship—one that invites attentiveness, care, and negotiation. By shifting the role of clothing from a functional object to a companion presence, the project proposes an alternative model of coexistence, where agency is shared rather than owned.

The work invites viewers to reconsider how intimacy, dependency, and companionship are constructed across species, and how design might function as a tool to question deeply embedded human-centred hierarchies.

Photo by Bofan
2025

"When the wearer puts it on, she notices subtle responses—breathing, shifting, reacting."

Photo by Bofan
2025

"A dialogue emerges."

Photo by Bofan
2025

[portfolio link]

Film Storyline

The garment is introduced as a living entity, subtle in its movements and presence. When the wearer first puts it on, she slowly realises that the clothing responds—breathing, shifting, and reacting to her body.

This discovery initiates a gentle dialogue between human and garment, evolving into a state of mutual interaction. As the film progresses, their connection deepens into a form of symbiosis, where neither leads nor follows. The final dance sequence symbolises this equal partnership—two beings moving together, co-existing in balance and reciprocity.

Performance

Shared Breath: A Speculative Performance of Breathing Companions

Breathing Companions imagines a garment not as something worn, but as something alive — a soft-robotic companion with its own breath, its own heartbeat, its own will. This performance stages a first encounter between two forms of life: human and garment, meeting not through control, but through co-presence.

The performance unfolds in three movements. In Dormancy, both bodies — human and garment — lie still, indistinguishable in their shared silence, neither one yet awake, neither one yet in charge. In Awakening & Yielding, the garment stirs first: its pulse becomes visible, its pneumatic structures begin to breathe, and the human wakes not into control but into surrender — drawn, led, carried by a rhythm not their own. In Duet & Symbiosis, resistance dissolves into dialogue. Human and garment move together, each shaping and responding to the other, until their breathing synchronizes and the question of who is leading no longer has an answer.

Rather than depicting technology as a tool to be worn or commanded, Breathing Companions proposes breath — the most primal, pre-linguistic signal of life — as a shared language between human and non-human bodies. The work asks what companionship might look like in a future where garments are not extensions of us, but beings beside us.