Vice Style

Photo by Milos Mali

Unlike other Australian labels, Romance Was Born unabashedly embrace kitsch Australiana, with a rampant flamboyancy rivaled only by Dame Edna. Their clothes are something like acid-trip haute couture, glued onto people in dinosaur format. Luke Sales and Anna Plunkett are the two halves of the romance. We got to speak to Luke.

VICE: On your website you refer to yourselves as creative bowerbirds. Those birds have one of the craziest courtship rituals on the planet. Do you think fashion is just an elaborate extended mating call?
Luke: No. Personally I don't find the way people dress to be sexy or appealing. Anna and I always say we don't want to make clothes to make people look beautiful, we want to make people look fabulous! I find the whole mating call thing and how people dress surreal. Sometimes I look in the mirror and think I look crazy today, then I get mad at myself that I even think like that.

I notice that you use a lot of under-utilized craft practices. Appliqué, tie dying, crochet… is anything off limits?
No not really. Each collection we work under a different theme and create a different story, so if anything fits with that story or mood then we’ll use it. However, we do always use crochet, we’ve done some sequins for summer and we are definitely going to use more knits. We actually went to the Australian Sheep and Wool Show the other day. We saw the women hand-spinning, hand-knitting and even hand-dying the wool themselves, and we bought a lot of stuff.

You have a history of art-based collaborations that add a bit substance to the whole fashion thing. Where do you find the people you collaborate with?
I suppose I never really consciously think about it when I go to a gallery or if I see something in a magazine. Then after a while, I start to process what I’ve seen and start to think about working with them. I thought Patrick Doherty’s style of drawing would really suit Doilies and Pearls, Oysters and Shells and so we approached him and collaborated with him on some prints. Then one day I went to the MCA to show Anna one of Patrick’s paintings, and it had been moved downstairs. On the wall it had been on, his work had been replaced with indigenous artist Esme Timbery, who makes kids' shoes out of shells, cardboard, and glue. Anna and I were so obsessed, we contacted her gallery and she ended up doing the shoes for that collection.

Photo from Katherineisawesome.com

You have an exhibition coming up and are desiging costumes for the Sydney Theater Company, so you’re pretty much open to any new challenge?
Yeah, there are some projects coming up that are really exciting that aren't necessarily fashion-based. It’s funny, when we first started working, I really enjoyed the challenge of making ready to wear collections. We struggled with the idea of having to recreate our pieces for sale, when everything we had been doing were one offs, and it would take a week to make the sleeve of a jacket. Now that we're on top of being able to put together a collection, we can start something new. I'd hate for it to ever get stale, because that's the one thing that doesn't suck about working for yourself.

Your work is so intricate you have to use loads of interns for beading and sewing and whatnot. Does handing over so much  responsibility bother you?
I’m not precious about handing over things like that. It's not like John Galliano sits down and makes every single one of those couture gowns, and I would be very surprised if he actually knew how to do that. We're always so grateful to everyone who helps. If it's not good you just re-do it, and sometimes they actually do a better job than I could do.

Speaking of John Galliano, I heard you turned down an internship with that amazing dude. Which designers would you want to do some shitkicking for?
There are a million designers I really like but only a few I'd actually want to work for. Probably Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, definitely nothing too conceptual, as much as I love that stuff. I know Anna would love to work for Chanel.

People wet their pants over the show but what exactly is a Renaissance Dinosaur?
It's funny you should say that, because the year before we had so much press, people were still talking about our previous collection during the Renaissance Dinasaur show. My friend was saying the situation was like that annoying ex-boyfriend you break up with, and everyone's always asking "what happened to him, he was great". I wanted to do a dinosaur collection back when I was still in fashion school, and we were thinking about doing it for summer. Then we went on a holiday to Florence – the birthplace of the renaissance – and we loved it and started joking that we should do a renaissance collection. Then as another joke, we said we should do renaissance dinosaurs and it kind of went from there.

So you just pick two completely different concepts and make them work?
I don't know how it comes about but we think of the collection like a theme. When Anna suggests something I know she wouldn’t say it unless she really meant it, and sometimes I think, oh god, how are we going to make this work? If it's not my idea, I find it hard to visualize what she's seeing in her head, so it's kind of like meeting someone halfway. Last year Anna wanted to do a grandma collection and I wanted to an under the sea collection. One day I was laughing with her about how you never see old mermaids, that they're always really youthful and beautiful, so what about a senior citizen mermaid? So instead of diamonds and pearls, we did doilies and pearls. Underwater.

I can make wild guesses about the sequins and knitwear but what's the idea behind the next collection?
My PR chick would tell me not to say anything but it’s kind of a back to nature theme.

Nothing for Anna’s dog Monaro?
Actually, at the moment we have an intern from London who’s a knitwear designer. Anna’s a big Rabbitohs supporter and we've told our intern that before she goes back she has to knit Monaro Rabbitohs jumper. He’s so cute. I really miss him when he doesn’t come in. This morning he was at our production manager’s desk. We always say Monaro's our supervisor and we have to run everything by him.

Thanks!

Rachel Elliot-Jones