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| Fictional girl band The Cherrys wear Meadham Kirchhoff for Topshop. Photography: Topshop |
The whole thing recalls candy-pop dreams and ravers. Dr Seuss. Vintage shops dishing up a mash-up of 70s/80s/90s. The sorts of thing you wish you'd find in a musty shop, but all you find is smelly taffeta. Pentagrams for those who remember The Craft when it was first cool. The attention-grabbing, eye-assaulting style favoured by street style bloggers. PVC like fetish wear and big lacy hearts like shojo girly mangas. Something genre-defying so as to be a brilliant spectacle. Show me something new, high street. Yes, this will do nicely.
If I were a manga schoolgirl, my reaction to the 89-piece range would be a shower of sparkles coming out of my head. Big love hearts and stars in my eyes. This is something I didn't foresee - it was a given that I'd lose my senses for Lanvin x H&M and Mulberry for Target, but I didn't know anything about Meadham Kirchhoff. I just know the first glimpses of the range I had on Grazia UK made my heart swell with delight that someone had thought to make a furry bag in sherbet pastels, and glitter cherry hair ties, and rainbow Mongolian stoles. Someone knew we all had inner freaks and geeks - and inner girl-band rockers. Someone thought a collection so exquisitely eccentric would take off, and it did. Within 24 hours of going live, so much had sold out on the website that I had to bolt down to Sydney's Topshop to make friends with a magical pastel dream skirt and glitter-lacquered cherry bag.
Then there's the cleverness of the narrative. I can't name another high-street collab that involved the designers dreaming up not one but four fictional women, and clothing them.
The designers in an interview have said that any of the pieces would do for 'one of those days when you want to tell the world to leave you alone'. I can't imagine why. If I saw you or anymore else in this garb, I'd want to know all about you.
