Scary fashion trends to try: You - yes you - can wear orange

Orange coats are so in right now.

Orange is the colour of easyJet, prison jumpsuits, the Netherlands, fish fingers and obviously oranges. As a pasty person, I always avoided orange because it’s this bold, traffic light, look-at-me colour. It’s the same thinking insecure brides use to justify putting their bridesmaids in horrible polyester peach dresses: they don’t want to be outshone by something that’s meant to be on their team. Instead I admired 50 shades of orange from afar, silently giving an approving nod to those courageous individuals totally pulling off burnt embers, marmalades and even rave party neon at 1pm on a Tuesday.

But then February 2016 rolled around and a weird thing happened. The weather had suddenly decided to give us a parting blast of winter and dropped the temperature by 10 degrees. Suddenly, orange was everywhere. Specifically orange coats. Classy macs, padded parkas, trendy cocoons, even capes. Camouflaged among everyone else who went for the sensible, goes-with-everything navy coat at the first bite of winter, I watched these colourful mavericks nonchalantly hopping on buses and strolling the streets, no doubt going somewhere fabulous and exciting in their attention-grabbing gear that defied the grey drizzle.

In 1957 this guy called James Vicary claimed that flashing the words ‘EAT POPCORN’ at people in a cinema more than doubled sales of the snack. A lot of people weren’t having this and he was accused of being a fraud, but probably most of us can admit that at some point we’ve found ourselves buying or thinking about something because we’ve been battered with adverts for it. (I bet you haven't thought about fish fingers in years...) That’s how orange worked for me. Seeing so many people embracing what I always thought was a trend reserved for people who know without googling how to pronounce Moschino (it's a ck not a shh, apparently) spurred me on to open my wardrobe and my heart to this shade.

The final push was seeing my sister Claire casually slipping on a super smart orange mac, the colour of sharon fruit (an actual fruit, not a person). I’ve been hanging on to her fashion coattails since we were kids and she cut up old Tammy Girl socks as sweatbands (trust me, it was all the rage in the early 2000s), so somehow this served as a final tick against the phrase ‘Orange as clothes?’

And then I met the orange jumper. In a last ditch attempt to prove to myself that orange, like cocaine and potholing, was best left to other people, I grabbed a random orange jumper from the men’s section of H&M. And the bastard fit. And, worse, instead of draining my skin of any remaining rosiness like a colour-sucking leech, it actually made me look more alive. It pointed to the bit of pink in my cheeks and went 'Hey, look at this!' It made my eyes look a little bit more blue. It was the wingman my wardrobe had been waiting for.

The ‘money’ part of my brain managed to wrestle the ‘fashion’ and ‘but I want it’ parts down and run away without it, but they launched a war of attrition over the next few weeks. Unfortunately my office is within a lunchtime walking distance of three H&Ms. After visiting the jumper two more times, it ended up on a coat hanger in my packed-out closet.

It didn't stay there. We’re still in the honeymoon phase of showing each other off on strolls along Southbank on sunny weekends and in smug photos on my Twitter profile. We snuggle up for Parenthood binges on rainy evenings. I’m planning on introducing it to more aspects of my life soon, but for now we're finding out what works for us (ice cream necklace: yes; burgundy hat: no).

What I learned from years of being a distant orange admirer and a few weeks of coming out in wild support was that your own personal style needs to be fluid. Sometimes fashion risks strike out. Like that phase when I wore nothing but baby blue tracksuit bottoms with Tammy Girl slogan t-shirts (the early 2000s was a good time for that shop but a bad time for fashion). But if something catches your eye on other people, it's worth being bold.

What it’s like to be a triplet

Part of me dreads the moment when the question of siblings comes up. I understand that people who haven’t bumped into many of Our Kind before are curious about what it’s like, but I still find it uncomfortable seeing your eyes widen slightly in surprise, as two more of me appear before you, like a drunken mirage. In my 24 years of experience, your first response will likely go one of four ways:

1. Are you identical?
2. I’ve never met a triplet before.
3. My friend’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s mother is a triplet.
4. Did your parents have fertility treatment?

Here are my responses.

1. I am fascinated by this question. It’s particularly fun if we’ve just been discussing my brother, and you’ve only found out I’m a triplet when I reveal we’re the same age. Firstly, while Matt is a fine-looking guy, I’d rather not look like him. Especially the beard. Secondly, having triplets at all is pretty freaky, having three who are genetically identical is about as likely as plunging your hand into a haystack and pulling out the needle you lost in there three months ago. OK, I haven’t checked the actual odds, but the point is, it’s not likely. I think the reason that perfectly logical people tend to jump to this one is that it helps you get your head around the visuals of three siblings all born at once.
2. Lucky me, taking your triplet virginity. Unfortunately you’re the 800^th person who’s told me that. Have a balloon and a sticker.
3. I probably know them through our secret triplet club* even though they live in Alaska. And you can definitely ascribe all aspects of their personality and life to me.
4. Er, can we please not discuss my parents’ sexual activities? On hearing that your birthday is in September, I don’t casually ask if that means your parents got a bit randy after one too many Christmas sherries, or whether you were conceived to the sound of Michael Buble’s Christmas hits, or Noddy Holder’s shrieking vocals. Luckily, it’s generally my mum who gets this one. The last person who asked me this didn’t exactly have an astute understanding of personal boundaries.

In fairness, I can understand the thought process behind these responses. Being a triplet is rare enough that it warrants comment, but it’s not a personal achievement that you can congratulate me on, or get much conversational material from. It’s even harder when I have to explain that I’m a triplet as context to an anecdote, as it inevitably sounds like I’m somehow bragging about my ‘special’ status.

Most of the time, the conversation moves on to more interesting matters. Sometimes, however, people want to know ‘What’s it like being a triplet?’ Here’s my carefully thought-through, incredibly insightful first-hand account.

I have no idea. To me – to us – you’re the freak. What do you mean you’ve never shared your birthday with two other people? How is it that you’ve never had your sibling in the same school year as you?

OK, since I reeled you in this far based on that title, I'll give it a go. On the one hand, we were all on a level playing field from the start. There’s no age-related basis for any of us to take all the responsibility (although it often gets shared out along gender lines instead.) There’s no ‘Why is he allowed to watch The Exorcist when I’m stuck with Thomas the Tank Engine?’ or ‘Why can she can drink vodka shots in the pub all night when I have a 9pm curfew?’ when you’re all the same age. The rules got made up and applied to all of us at the same time, so there was no sense of injustice over ‘But Stacey got a car when she was seventeen, where’s mine?’

There are drawbacks, too. Getting everything in one hit, tripled, can be tough. Events like exam results become highly pressured, as our parents are faced with comforting and celebrating at the same time. Worse than that, however, is the tendency for others to view us as a big lump, vaguely divided into three. As any siblings can attest to, this was probably not helped by the matching clothes (thanks for that, Mum).

This is less of a problem now we’re all spread out and making our own friends, but when we were younger, we were very much viewed as ‘The Triplets’. Even when alone, it often felt as though people could only properly place me when they remembered that ah, yes, you’re one of the three. Even science turned against us: I remember one dispiriting program where Professor Robert Winston cheerfully announced that the reason humans don’t give birth to more than one child at once is so we learn to love our offspring as individuals, and are therefore more likely to take care of them in the face of sabre-tooth tiger attacks. Thanks, Bob.

This tendency to picture triplets as clones, rather than separate people, is even funnier because the three of us are as different as, you know, ‘normal’ siblings. Matt speaks rarely but thoughtfully, and has an outrageously dark sense of humour and a love of horror films that would leave me sleeping bolt upright with a shotgun for months. Claire has a beautifully artistic mind and the skills to match, is very messy (own it, sis), and incredibly empathetic. I am bossy, efficient with everything but timekeeping, and with a tendency to babble into any conversational silence. Yes, there are similarities between us, like our eyes and a fondness for feminist outbursts, but no more than you would expect from fraternal siblings of any age gap.

Similarly, just as people assume the youngest child is spoilt and the oldest is in charge, being a triplet has not endowed me with personality traits you might expect someone who's always been flanked by two others to have. It definitely has not made me good at sharing. I tend to be independent, and I don’t like being told what to do, and I never have.

I’m sorry to squash anyone’s fantasies about how amazing it would be to have a sibling who can double as another you, as seems to happen in all those delightful books you grew up reading (Double Act was a personal favourite). However, the happy truth is that any siblings, or even friends, who spend enough time together can develop that almost uncanny psychic bond. You don’t need to share a womb, a birthday cake or a bloodline to connect with someone like that. 

Ultimately, I know that as with having a sibling of any age, the experience of being a triplet has shaped my identity and my life. However, I’d also like to think there are more important and interesting things to me than the fact I share my birthday with two other awesome Lavenders.

*Actually, there is a secret triplet club. It’s called Super Twins, which is a term for multiple births of more than twins, who apparently aren’t impressive enough any more. It wasn’t actually the place where we all made triplet-only conspiracies as much as an opportunity for our parents to find solidarity and alcohol while we all ran riot in whoever’s house was due to be destroyed that month.