Photo © Georgia Kuhn
In the studio with Sibling and their radical vision for menswear
It turns out that 2008 will go down in history for more than the start of the global financial crisis. It was also the year that Sibling was born. The lovechild of three parents – Cozette McCleery, Joe Bates and Sid Bryan– the knitwear label has since gone on to take the world by storm.
It didn’t start that way. These three, who were friends before colleagues and who decided on Sibling while lounging around a pool in Ibiza, all had previous form with the fashion industry, with Bryan and McCleery meeting at Bella Freud. For Sibling, though, they wanted something a bit different. Bates, the self-confessed loudest of the three, recalls the moment. “We started as an exercise in indulgence,” he explains. “We presented the collection in May, outside of any fashion week, with a party. One of the points of our manifesto was not to sell anything.”
It’s fair to say this strategy backfired. McCreery, currently sporting pink hair to match her pink leopard-print Sibling sweater, remembers “being hounded by buyers from Beams.” The Japanese department store, as usual, were onto something. As Bates says, Sibling was designed to bring back “joy in dressing”, and as a label it has been as refreshing as a cola with lemon on a hot day. Uniquely menswear, sweaters were covered with appliqué rats, twinsets for boys were leopard-print and there were sequin tank tops. It had colour, wit and, crucially, knit.
Fast-forward five years and that accidental flourish of success seems far from a flash in the pan. When Sleek visited their studio in East London, the Sibling gang were huddled around a leather sofa: Bates is smart in a double breasted jacket, while McCreery is in trademark Converse, that pink sweater with matching hair and Sid, the quietest, wears a quiff, neon sneakers and some interesting towelling shorts. Mycroft, the resident English bull terrier, later joins us, snuggling his substantial self on Bryan’s lap.
The studio looks like it has been grown out of long ago. Jumpers from the autumn collection are piled on a sample table, while a huge box of buttons is propped up behind us. Sketches for the spring collection lean against a bookshelf and several younger members of the Sibling extended family are tapping on laptops. In short, it’s the picture of a buzzy fashion label on the up in 2013.
But for the figures at the centre of it, the story still comes back to 2008. “Everything we worked on for the first collection has been part of the brand since then,” says McCreery. “It was like a primordial soup of Sibling.” Into the pot goes a hefty dose of texture, sorbet colours for boys and girls and the kind of “in” references – ranging from cult classic punk oral history “Please Kill Me” to tupperware parties – that are sure to score a set of devoted fans.