Australian couturier Tamara Ralph’s fashion journey has been both fairytale and fable
The Cronulla-born designer shares how the life lessons she’s learned are fuelling her eponymous haute couture brand.
In a nondescript office building several floors above the muddy River Thames in London, two women who look to be in their twenties are manipulating a metallic bodice with pairs of pliers. Top 40 music playing softly is the only sound, other than the hiss of an industrial-strength iron as a white-coated staffer presses a toile into a shape. Nearby, another is manipulating silk floral petal appliqués and placing them carefully into a pile. Each flower will later be pinned to a cascade of roses down the back of a wedding dress.
It’s a Monday morning in the Tamara Ralph atelier in London, where the hushed industry of the room is overseen by Shirley, the warm and exceedingly calm head of the design studio who has worked with Ralph for more than 10 years.
Shirley points to a gold mesh dress that seems to morph and undulate and appears to have no seams as a piece of which she is particularly proud. There are, she notes, many stages in the creation of a Tamara Ralph gown and they can take many thousands of hours of work, not to mention the modifications required in such one-of-a-kind creations. Affixed to the walls are specifications from clients awaiting their pieces – some have requested a more manageable train, to add a sleeve or raise a hemline. The dresses are for brides and mothers-of-the-brides and for parties that will and won’t be written about in the press.
As Tamara Ralph explains to WISH several weeks after our visit to the atelier, “couture is a very personal service”.
This is not only in the relationships with the clients, who Ralph attends to in her Paris maison, invites to her biannual runway shows (the rules of haute couture is why the brand also has the design studio in Paris) and when required, travels to fit them wherever they are around the world. But also in her atelier, where many of her staff have worked with her for years. Ralph – who is speaking to WISH over Zoom from Monaco; the designer splits her time between a home there and another in Cannes, where these images were shot – visits the atelier almost every week.
“They’re very much like family. They’re incredibly talented, very special people. A lot of the different departments in the business, not just in the atelier, I’ve worked with for many, many years and I have a huge amount of respect for them and their talents,” she says.
“We have a very nice bond. They understand my aesthetic, what I want to achieve with the design and with the business. It makes it a very easy experience working together.”
Tamara Ralph launched her eponymous haute couture house in 2022. Lately it’s been everywhere, from Amal Clooney dripping in strands of pearls at the Tony Awards in June to Angelina Jolie draped in chiffon for the premiere of her film, Maria. Florence Pugh was a delicious cream puff in tiers of pink silk for the We Live In Time premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, while Kylie Minogue opted for a navy velvet gown with enamel flower detail and a cloud of ostrich feathers for the premiere of Good Night, and Good Luck in New York in April. Nicole Kidman, confirms Ralph, has also worn the brand.
Ralph’s story in fashion however has been both fairytale and fable.
To go back to the beginning. Ralph, whose family is also in the made-to-measure business, says her first memory of fashion is sitting in her mother’s Cronulla sewing room, in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, where her family is still based.
“Whenever I had a spare second, I was always with my mum in the sewing room, or even when she would go out, I would sneak in there and have a look at her sketches and play with the patterns and things like that. And then I started to really get interested in it and my grandmother saw that, and so she started teaching me the technical side of things with the stitching and the draping,” she says.
It was when Ralph was 13 and declaring to her mother that she wanted to be a fashion designer when she grew up and live abroad that her grandmother started to take her seriously. She bought her first Stockman dressmaker’s mannequin and every week Ralph would show her creations to her grandmother. “After school I would make little things, outfits, skirts. On Saturday I would go and visit her and bring her everything that I made that week and she would be like, ‘No, this is wrong, take that apart’. And she would rip it as well, rip the seams open and try to look inside to see if the internal stitching was correct. She was quite a difficult critic, I must say,” adds Ralph with a laugh.
“She used to make me unpick everything until it was absolutely perfect … and I’m thankful so much for her doing that because that really set my foundation for the couture techniques that I instil in the atelier today and really gave me a foundation of craftsmanship, of luxury, of perfectionism.”
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Eventually these weekend visits would become some of Ralph’s most formative memories and learnings.
“I would look forward to going to see her on a weekend and seeing what she thought, seeing if I had improved … It’s those early memories of being with my grandmother and my mother in the sewing room and being creative that really gave me a taste of fashion. You’re doing it because it’s a love and a passion.”
Her mother still attends every one of her fashion shows. But now she stays on to spend time with Ralph, her partner of seven years, businessman Bhanu Choudhrie, and their two children, Haliya, four and Nylah, one.
While Ralph says she’s always working in some way – she travels everywhere with a sketchbook, should inspiration strike – she likes the delineation between work and home that living outside of Paris and London has provided.
“We have the atelier in London, the maison in Paris, we show in Paris and I live in Monaco and then we have the house in Cannes as well. So I’m kind of between this triangle of cities constantly. And when I first moved to Monaco [in 2020], it was actually during covid and I loved it because I love London, I love Paris, I love big cities, I love the energy, but it was also nice to come home to somewhere where you had a sea view,” she says.
“It’s nice to have that separation as well. And especially now I have two young daughters, for them to grow up somewhere where it’s safe, the weather’s nice … and it’s family. I’m in and out of London very, very often, almost on a weekly basis. It’s my very hectic, busy schedule and then it’s home and it’s family time.”
Both daughters love spending time in the atelier. Ralph likes to include them when she can, too. Becoming a mother has given her work new meaning.
“I’m able to involve them in it, they’re at the show in Paris and they’re backstage and they’re in the show preparation with the model castings and the fittings, they’re there with me. So they’re seeing all of this … And whether or not they decide to have a career in fashion or not is completely up to them. But it’s this exposure of having that figurehead [that] is important for me and very much more so now,” she says.
“It gave my career purpose having my daughters, because you are working for them, you are working to build a legacy for them as well. And to have a role model in their lives was incredibly important for me. So that’s one of my biggest drivers with the business … and I think it makes it easier to juggle family and work when they are there with me.”
Both daughters – like many small girls (and boys) – are enamoured with the flounce and sparkle and the sheer fanciness of their mother’s work. Dresses feature rosettes and columns of silver beads that look invincible in their glamour as well as enamel florals that twist and turn around the body as if in bloom.
“Every morning they come and see if there’s a new sketch or if there’s a new fabric and they love to see the embroideries and things like this. It’s very special for them to see a figure that works hard, has a career,” she says.
Her eldest is particularly taken by her work.
“The four-year-old is very creative, she actually sketches with me when I sketch, which is lovely. And so before she would just paint and it would just be flowers and suns and things like that. And now she’s actually asked me to help her sketch dresses,” she says, smiling.
“I think the younger one, even though she’s only one, I mean she might very well end up being creative, but she’s a very different personality,” says Ralph.
“I think the older one is kind of much more me, my personality, quite creative. And the younger one has a very, very strong personality, which is amazing. I feel like she’s going to be the chief executive … One is very assertive, very strong. And the other one is very creative and soft,” she laughs.
Which is not to say, like Ralph’s metalwork flower bodices, that you can’t be both soft and tough at the same time.
But back to the idea of fable. Ralph says she has learned a lot from the collapse of her first business and the one that made her name, Ralph & Russo. The British brand was launched in 2006 with her then business and life partner Michael Russo. It achieved remarkable success. It was the first British house in more than 100 years to be invited to show on the official haute couture schedule by the French governing body of high fashion, Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode.
The brand once had stores in locales such as Paris, Dubai and Monte-Carlo, and was famously worn by Meghan Markle in her engagement photo shoot in 2017. But the business sustained significant financial losses and went into administration in 2021. Eventually it was sold to US investment firm Retail Ecommerce Ventures. The firm appointed administrators to manage a second insolvency of Ralph & Russo in April this year. Ultimately the brand was unable to repay a loan to its biggest creditor, the investment vehicle owned by British businessman Nick Candy. Candy Ventures later sued Ralph, who left the business in 2021. Administrators claimed, among other accusations, that the designer had used company funds for personal expenses. Ralph strongly denied the claims, labelling them “misconceived and demonstrably false”. The case was due to go to the UK High Court but settled out of court in May this year, the terms of which remain confidential.
Ralph says her learnings from this period – and the failings of Ralph & Russo – have been invaluable. “I think you learn a lot of lessons through life and through business, and you need to learn from those lessons and move on, which is important,” she says.
“Those lessons are invaluable, they really shape who you are and your decisions going forward. With my new business, I’m heavily involved in the business and the finances side of things. Before I was very much the creative vision and now I’m both, which is the business, the finances and the creative,” she says of how she is running things differently this time around.
“What I really love now is about choosing that path myself, making the decisions myself, the financial decisions myself, and also steering the business in the way that
I see it going.”
Launching a new business, she says, was exciting and daunting at the same time. She says she is grateful for the people who stood by her.
“I have a lot of people in the industry that supported me and obviously all my team that I’ve worked with for a very long time as well, all being back together like a family,” she says.
This includes the host of high-profile women – including celebrities and royalty – who have continued to wear Ralph’s pieces. Angelina Jolie, for one, the designer says, has been a long-time supporter.
“I’ve had quite a lot of celebrities that I’ve worked with for many, many years and have supported me from the start. Angelina Jolie was one of my first celebrities I ever worked with, and Beyoncé as well … these women that I really respect and that are continually supportive throughout my career, which is amazing,” Ralph says.
“We work with the celebrities that we feel really embody the brand and that needs to feel organic. We very much work with empowered women, accomplished women, people that we really feel embody who the Tamara Ralph woman is.”
Her clients live all around the world, with South America and the Middle East particularly strong markets. She’s happy to now have several Australian clients.
“It’s so nice to see my country growing as a region in luxury like this. I think Australia has evolved completely in luxury over the past couple of years,” Ralph says.
If it wasn’t the fast pace of fashion, she would have found thrills in other ways.
“If I wasn’t a fashion designer, I always told my mother I would be a racing-car driver,” she says with a laugh. “I love cars and I am a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I love car racing, obviously I don’t really do car racing anymore. But when I get the chance to do adrenaline kind of sports and things, I love it. I’ve done everything from skydiving to bungee jumping … I just always was fascinated by it. I love the thrill and the adrenaline.” Perhaps, though, there is a synergy between this love of an adrenaline rush and how she sees the Tamara Ralph woman moving through the world.
“I think she’s very feminine and elegant and graceful, but she’s also strong and empowered. I think she’s quite fearless,” she says of her ideal client.
Ralph is reshaping the business in other ways, including, ultimately, expanding beyond fashion. “I think doing things differently, I wanted to solidify the brand with different product categories that are very exclusive, very curated, and to really build the brand in that way and protect it with this very elevated vision,” she says.
This includes working on a number of shared projects. In 2024, Ralph collaborated with the high-end watchmaker Audemars Piguet on a limited-edition Royal Oak Concept Flying Tourbillon watch that took inspiration from the craftsmanship of the couture ateliers. Here, she applied her signature enthusiasm.
“They have very much the top-tier of the luxury watch industry, and we share quite a lot of the same clients,” says Ralph of the affinity between the two brands.
“For them, the female market is incredibly important. Obviously the watch market was very much dominated by male clients in the past, and I think watch brands are seeing that the female market in that category is growing a lot. To collaborate with them was amazing … I didn’t at first know how to start. I hadn’t ever designed a watch before. But when I got into it, I was so inspired that I actually didn’t stop sketching. And François-Henry Bennahmias, the chief executive at the time, had to tell me to stop sketching,” laughs Ralph. “He was so impressed with the types of ideas that I brought and the sheer volume of ideas that I had. And he said, ‘You don’t think like a watch designer; you think like a creative, so you’re bringing something that we haven’t seen in the watch industry before’.”
Other collaborations have included the French crystal brand Daum, and there are more in the works. One day Ralph would love to indulge her passion for interiors – another passion she picked up from her mother. “I love interiors. It was something that I was surrounded by when I was young with my mum. She was in fashion first and then went into interiors,” she says. “Showcasing a lifestyle aspect is something that we’re really interested in at the moment.”
Ralph’s thrillseeking side can still get its fix with the staging of a runway show. This season the couturier showed her autumn/winter 2025-2026 collection, Le Perle Rare, at the Palais de Tokyo’s Orbe New York off-schedule on the first day of haute couture week last month.
This was an impressively glamorous crowd. American actor Hailee Steinfeld – who wore three Tamara Ralph dresses for her May wedding to NFL star Josh Allen – arrived late, while celebrity stylist Law Roach perched on the front row alongside clients in clouds of feathers, Hermès bags and serious jewels. Ralph’s mother, in bow-bedecked Tamara Ralph, sat next to Ralph’s partner, who had the couple’s eldest daughter Haliya – in a froth of sequinned black tulle and a little ballerina bun – on his lap.
Down the runway came bodices made from shards of mother-of-pearl, bugle beads and strands of pearls that gently clanked as the models walked by. They were Oscar gowns to-be with dramatic silhouettes destined to make grand entrances and exits, while a caped bride closed the show
These Tamara Ralph shows are far more personal affairs than those staged for Ralph & Russo. “It is more intimate, and that was done purposely. We have our very special clients attend, and there is a really big proportion of people attending the show that are actually clients … for them to be there and to see the pieces and experience the show and experience the brand like that is very important,” she says.
“It is always a very busy process putting on a show because I’m very involved with every detail, from the music to the lighting to the models to the fittings. I do everything myself. It is a lot of long hours, sleepless nights, things like that. But I still enjoy it. And I think that it doesn’t ever get old and it doesn’t ever get easier. You feel you’ve done it so many times that it should just be easy, but it doesn’t become less stressful,” she says. “But it’s fun. We love it.”
Ralph says she will judge the success of her next chapter in several ways, including going the distance. “Building a brand that lasts and has purpose and has very clear brand values, image, creatively, aesthetics, all of those are very important pillars of success for me. It’s not just about selling pieces … it’s obviously the business success, but also the creative success and building something that has substance and purpose.”
Photography: Nick Shaw
Styling: Miguel Urbina Tan
Hair and make-up: Ismael Blanco
Production: Nicola Sevitt
This story is from the August issue of WISH.
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