Australian fashion label Romance Was Born gets the portrait treatment on 20th anniversary
Designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales are the focus of an expansive new artwork on display at the National Portrait Gallery.
20 years of Romance Was Born, one of Australia’s most beloved fashion brands, warranted a major celebration.
Yesterday at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Sydney-based artist and photographer Samuel Hodge unveiled a large-scale portrait of Romance Was Born’s designers, Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, to commemorate the brand’s 20th anniversary. The work features various photographs of Romance Was Born’s designs spanning back to the mid-2000s, when Hodge first met Plunkett and Sales and began documenting their work.
It’s a fittingly expansive celebration of Romance Was Born, which Plunkett and Sales founded in 2005 while studying at university in Sydney. The label has long been defined by its kaleidoscopic output, and its elaborate, kitsch-inspired garments have been acquired by museums and galleries in Australia and abroad.
Romance Was Born has consistently brought Australia’s most famous artists and creatives into the fold, including Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson and Del Kathryn Barton, who have all collaborated on past collections. For Hodge, the duo’s renegade spirit and expansive oeuvre was important to document in the artwork, which is set across multiple different panels.
“I think the one thing that stood out for me, from the very beginning, is that Anna and Luke have always been rogue in the way they approach their work,” Hodge tells Vogue Australia exclusively in the August issue, on sale August 4. “They organically reject the perceivable and correct way of how things ‘should’ be done, and go to great and sometimes excessive lengths, above and beyond.”
Sales, who met Hodge through mutual friends at a Sydney pub in 2005, has long favoured Hodge’s photographic eye, which eschews elaborate setups to capture fashion in everyday contexts. “It’s a really nice way to shoot because some [photographers] can really just keep on going, but [Hodge is] always so considered,” Sales says. “He has a knack for just catching the moment.”
Hodge has documented Romance Was Born’s designs everywhere from Sydney’s harbour beaches and the Blue Mountains to Paris, where Plunkett and Sales showed a collection in the fashion capital in 2018. “We were drinking, eating, dancing to Boney M. and stitching Swarovski crystals to a knitted cockatoo dress with Jenny Kee, [make-up artist] Nicole ‘Pinky’ Thompson and Luke’s mum all there, too,” Hodge recalls of the night before the runway presentation. Images of those candid moments appear in the artwork, as do Romance Was Born’s famous collaborators like Kee.
For Sales and Plunkett, the irony is not lost that after decades of incorporating artists’ clothes into their own work, their work is now open for artistic interpretation.
“For 20 years, I guess artists have trusted us with their work and handed it over, and we’ve done our thing,” Sales says, contemplatively. “But this is a case of us [trusting them].”
For the full story, read Vogue Australia’s August issue, on sale Monday, August 4.
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