‘I’ve never really worked with other designers in the same way as with Romance,’ says Jackson. ‘They wanted me to hand paint and hand print everything.’ Jackson says that a collaboration of this ilk is ‘100 per cent’ steeped in trust. She recalls the moment she handed over a huge piece of silk covered in paintings of waratahs. ‘And then, oh my god, Luke’s got scissors! [But] I was the artist, they were the couturiers. I was not the person who was making the clothes. They’re very clever about the people that they have collaborations with and how they translate an artist’s work.’
Ken Done likens their Resort 2023 collaboration to ‘three cooks making a giant banquet’, adding that he knew it would work as he was ‘already thrilled with their creativity’. He notes their intuitive design nature; when the pair first visited his studio, Plunkett’s eye was immediately drawn to one of the paint-splodged enamel plates that the artist uses as a palette. She thought that it would look great as a hat, picking it up and modelling it as one. A number of catwalk looks were finished off with the dishes, refashioned into headpieces.
The results on the catwalk are, inevitably, overflowing with equally offbeat ideas, witty details and a sense of humour that happily cohabits with exquisite craftsmanship and an unfettered elegance. Glynis Jones describes them as ‘wearable art pieces that are the ultimate expression of the designers’ fantastical narratives, creative collaborations, art prints and artisanal embellishments’.
Even their ‘simpler’ ready-to-wear pieces are loaded with artistic collaborations, including via commercial agreements with the May Gibbs Estate to feature the author’s beloved Snugglepot and Cuddlepie characters, or with Disney, using its 1950 animated classic Cinderella as the basis for the A Kiss Before Midnight collection of 2021.
Samuel Hodge’s photographic work found its way onto romantic dresses in the brand’s Spring/Summer 2020 Golden Promise collection. The prints were created from collages of Hodge’s photographs, mostly flowers, which he had made during an artist residency at Paris’ Cité Internationale des Arts in 2019. Included in the shots were some he had taken of the flower arrangements on the catwalk at Romance’s Paris show. ‘I was looking at them one day and they were so beautiful, the photos,’ says Sales. ‘And I was like, oh, they would make a really nice print.’
The results were given movement in the undulating ruffles of diaphanous silk or hung from rope straps in a simpler trapeze dress. Hodge then photographed the collection for the brand – making a rare return to his brief career in fashion photography. Shot in and around Plunkett’s then home, with cars and drying sheets as backdrops, the results walk the rickety fenceline between ethereal and grounded in a suburban reality.
While she can’t speak for other institutions on what makes Romance Was Born so integral to their collections, Glynis Jones says that for the Powerhouse, ‘Romance Was Born’s work is a focus of our contemporary collecting as they have a history of innovative, highly creative design, their visual narratives engage with the Australian environment, customs and lifestyle and the work itself demonstrates a high level of craftmanship.’ This makes perfect sense of the 52 outfits now owned by the institution, including the crochet-square dress worn by Cate Blanchett on the red carpet in 2009, a recreation of an Iced Vo-Vo biscuit rendered in pompoms (both from their Doilies and Pearls collection) and the Mardi Gras dress, a veritable rainbow of tinsel wigs and laser-cut acrylic that distills Sydney’s Oxford Street parade into a single sartorial gesture, presented in a 2012 exhibition created in collaboration with installation artist Rebecca Baumann.
Since the earliest years of the brand, which is as long as their friendship, Hodge, Plunkett and Sales have been artistic allies. ‘We had this ongoing kind of thing that I could always just be around,’ says Hodge. ‘I would just be in their studio hanging out, backstage during the shows, taking photos.’ Which translates as 20 years of candid shots of the pair at work and at play, of backstage preparations and finished campaigns, some of which are pictured here. All of these elements will come together in the final portrait commission for the National Portrait Gallery.
‘The process [of collage] is the main part of it,’ says Hodge. ‘And it’s kind of perfect with this portrait as well. It’s nice to have this massive archive of material and to just be able to put it all together into a frame. It’ll be like several hundred to a thousand pieces all framed to represent one portrait of Luke and Anna.’ ‘We’ve been sitting for this portrait for 20 years,’ adds Luke with a laugh, and Plunkett swiftly concurs.
There’s something of the outsider to Hodge’s work, a feeling all three creatives can relate to and believe contributes to their connection, all coming to Sydney from various regional locations. That viewpoint is also visible in Hodge’s three years of fashion photography – which he abandoned for his personal photography, collage work, artistic experimentation and currently a PhD in ‘material ecologies’ at the University of Technology Sydney where he also teaches design theory, practice and fashion theory. His fashion photographs were never glossy or sophisticated, as people often like to imagine they should be; rather, they always had a lo-fi, gritty sheen to them.
‘Sam’s photos have an emotion about them,’ says Sales. ‘And that’s something that me and Anna always say – we want our customer to have an emotional response to the garment. With Sam’s work, it captures something that doesn’t just feel like a normal photo. I just like seeing our work through his lens – no pun intended.’
‘He interprets it really effortlessly,’ says Plunkett. ‘Like, it’s just really cool.’ She also relishes the humour that Hodge brings to his work, whether a model sprawled out on verdant grass in a black-and-white yin-and-yang jumper, or the time he ‘put our rainbow patchwork pleated cape on his auntie [who was] just having a ciggie out the back with the cockatoo – he’s just really funny’.
As much as Hodge hates to do straight portrait photography, he will also capture the pair in a dedicated shoot for the commission. Once everything comes together, the finished work will be in three parts, bookended by Luke and Anna ‘and the middle piece will be kind of an overview of everything’. It will be as much an insight into the Romance Was Born universe as it will be depictions of its creators. When installed, he hopes to have more collages covering the wall behind the frames for an even more immersive – and potentially mind-altering – experience. ‘My favourite thing is when I’ve been allowed to make these installations and people come over and they spend a lot of time kind of investigating all the different things,’ says Hodge. ‘A little bit confused, a little bit intrigued.’
Once the portrait is unveiled, that intrigue will shift to insight into the creative processes of Plunkett and Sales, and a fashion brand unlike anything Australia has ever produced. A brand that is as much multi-layered multiverse as it is lo-fi and local; mille feuille meets meat pie. Incongruous, but utterly delicious.![]()
