A Knitwear Brand We Love
SIBLING.
Granny gone punk: the London label that took the stuffiest craft in fashion and made it roar.
Fashion takes itself terribly seriously. SIBLING never did, and that is exactly why they belong in this archive.
This one is not an interview. It is a love letter to a label that proved you can be deadly serious about craft and refuse to be serious about anything else. Three friends with impeccable training, the kind of CVs that run through Alexander McQueen, Lanvin, and Giles Deacon, who chose to spend that expertise on sequin-encrusted leopard twinsets and knitted monsters.
In an industry where everyone takes themselves wayyyyy too seriously, here were people from the serious side of it having actual fun, and making quality while they did it. Life is not all that serious. At least it does not have to be. SIBLING knitted that philosophy into every stitch, and I have never stopped appreciating them for it.
Leila
SIBLING was conceived as an antidote to traditional menswear. The trio, unrelated but bonded like family, chose the name to make their unapologetically avant-garde pieces feel inclusive, like something you were being invited into rather than kept out of. The idea was settled, fittingly, while lounging around a pool in Ibiza.
Their method was to start from the most conventional pieces in the knitwear canon, the twinset, the argyle, the trucker jacket, and push them somewhere gleefully unrecognizable: sequin-encrusted leopard twinsets, knitted "denim" truckers, hand-crocheted everything. The famous Knit Monsters took the politest garment imaginable, the traditional twinset, and grew it into a complete covering, a creature you wore.
Joe Bates, the self-confessed loudest of the three, remembered the launch best: they presented the first collection in May, outside any fashion week, with a party. "We started as an exercise in indulgence." As mission statements go, it never needed updating.
The aesthetic read as Pussy Riot raiding your grandmother's knitting basket: balaclava energy, riotous color, classics riffed into rebellion. The references ran wide, from the cinematography of West Side Story to youth tribes, reportage photography, and the musical memories of their childhoods. The artfully disheveled cardigans and black wide-brimmed hats carried everything from Robert Smith to the witchy stylings of Stevie Nicks.
But underneath the mischief, they really knew knitwear. Bates and McCreery were long obsessed with the craft; Bryan went on to specialize in it. The clothes were feats of engineering wearing a grin: most pieces took upwards of 100 hours to complete, and the springy circle skirts, superfine ribs, and oversized loop-stitch scarves of the Sister years remain a quiet masterclass in technique. (K)nitwits, they were not. In 2010 the signature extended to womenswear with Sister by SIBLING, which later traveled all the way to a Topshop collaboration, and the tongue-in-cheek consistency of it all earned them the European Woolmark Prize.
"We started as an exercise in indulgence. We presented the collection in May, outside of any fashion week, with a party."Joe Bates · SIBLING
Watch: SIBLING in motion
In 2015, Joe Bates passed away from cancer at the age of 47. Bryan and McCreery carried the label forward before placing it on hiatus in 2017, signing off with the A/W 17 menswear collection. The joy they made together outlives the label, which is the only kind of legacy that matters.
- Sister by SIBLING at Topshop · Cozette McCreery talks to Dazed
- How to start a fashion brand, by SIBLING's Cozette McCreery · i-D
- Cozette McCreery on Instagram · @cozettemc
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About Antakly Projects
Antakly Projects has been in conversation with artists and creatives from around the world since 2003.
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