For Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, the Australian duo behind the label Romance Was Born, working off the fashion grid has been both planned and purposeful. Soon after graduating from the East Sydney Technical College, they were offered internships at John Galliano. They turned them down. “We had never been to Europe, had no money and couldn’t speak a word of French so we decided to stay home and start our own thing,” Plunkett explains. “I think compared to the rest of the world, Australia is more laid-back and I guess our approach to fashion is kind of like that oakley frogskin sunglasses, too.” Their first show, Regional Australia, celebrated small-town Aussie culture — the designers held it at their local pub and served barbecued sausages. In the five years since, Romance Was Born has concentrated on making exuberantly patterned clothes that draw freely on a rich cache of references including musical genres, family lore and cultural icons. The spring 2012 collection, which will be available in the United States at Los Angeles’s Tenoversix, is no exception. Called Happy Campers, it features a standout rainbow lamé cape and matching skirt and was inspired by, among other things, Girl Guides, 1970s camping equipment, Moroccan wedding rugs and German Scheurich ceramics. Cate Blanchett, who commissioned Romance Was Born to make costumes for the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of “Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness,” is a fan, as is Tavi Gevinson, who included the label in a book she’s editing for Phaidon.
Romance Was Born’s latest collection features a standout rainbow lamé cape and matching skirt.
Plunkett and Sales are collaborating with Marvel Comics on a collection based on the forthcoming film version of “The Avengers” and recently fielded a call from the stylist and costume designer Arianne Phillips, who wanted to borrow clothes for Madonna. The Paris boutique Colette has also come calling. All of which suggests that the label won’t be remote for much longer. But that doesn’t mean that the designers are headed into the mainstream. Remoteness, it seems, is also a state of mind. Plunkett says: “We are pretty much in our own bubble.”
In the fashion industry oakley frogskin sunglasses, designers who work outside the New York-London-Paris-Milan quadrangle are often viewed as somewhat unfortunate oakley frogskin sunglasses, the idea being that not having access to the history and creative buzz of those cities puts them at a professional disadvantage. But isolation has its bright side, namely the chance to nurture one’s vision free of any homogenizing influences. (Cristóbal Balenciaga, the most revered of fashion’s autodidacts, spent 18 years perfecting his trade in Madrid before opening his salon on the Avenue George V.)
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