Pretty in Pink. The Pink List. Think Pink. The headlines write themselves. But in reality today's Sibling show - a tribute to the most acidic, eye-popping, man-made shade of pink you could find - isn't easy to dissect. Despite the one hue palette and the references to British school days - a reference so ubiquitous post Saint Trinian's, Harry Potter and The History Boys that even those who only set foot on UK soil twice a year for LC:M can understand its subtlest nuances - this wasn't a straight up celebration of silly, surface detail. Indeed, it split opinion. Some loved the riotous and deliberate bad taste of it all, others found it too ugly, too much. It was super sized, in-your-face fashion, from those blown up knitted teddy bears to the suits fashioned from brown paper. To put it bluntly it looked like what people who don't work in fashion imagine 'fashion people' dress like at fashion week - all glitters, gems and Bruno shrunken shorts.
Fun's become big news in fashion. Social media loves silly, maximalist styling. From pictures alone you'd be forgiven for categorising Sibling's show alongside those by the masters of deliberate ignorance and idiocy, the kind of designers that cater to little more than LOL-culture - think Jeremy Scott at Moschino. But that would be underselling the trio. They may be optimistic but they're not philistines. And for every dollop of silliness on that runway - the crystallised ties, the teddies, the costume rugby socks - there was an equal dose of something less easy to swallow, something irreverent and angry; see the vinyl latex that echoed the iconic SEX sign on the Kings Road to the thick goat hair outerwear. Indeed, this may have been Sibling's sickest show yet. It was grotesque and gruesome. It's apt that punk was a reference as it echoed the odd, crazed, infantile energy and aesthetics of rebel icons like Sid Vicious who decorated their clothes with dummies and posed like dumb kids while singing about anarchy and angst. In fashion, it's easy to be somber, but it's hard to be both silly and cerebral. Sibling always manage to make us think despite all the deliberate shallowness and spangles. That's an irony they love and they pushed it to its extreme for A/W 15.
