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In the lead up to Sydney’s annual Mardi Gras, hosting World Pride, along with the passing of Dame Vivienne Westwood and other legendary harbingers of social defiance, it’s felt like something has been trying to break through at the periphery of the culture.
Something chaotic, something deviant and demanding an explosive outlet. Like a good old fashioned protest. Or an illegal rave. Or, in the case of Romance Was Born, a fashion show in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Paul Yore that goes full bananas on our aesthetic and political sensibilities.
Set against Yore’s installation work Word Made Flesh at Carriageworks, Yore and Romance Was Born co-founders Lukes Sales and Anna Plunkett delivered beautiful anarchy for the Winter 2023 collection. Titled Stronger Together, it was a celebration of the chaos that comes from a loving, diverse and supportive community where creativity and ideas that make no sense can co-exist and creating something wonderful in the process.
“I saw one of Paul’s tapestry’s about 10 years ago with a mutual friend of ours,” says Sales post-show when asked about how the collab came about.
“She explained to me his practice and I was keen to see more and then slowly started to see more of his work around various galleries. I eventually followed him on Instagram and like everything today we started to talk and it went from there.”
Yore adds that he’d been a fan of Romance Was Born’s work for years before they finally met: “I first saw their work in the flesh over a decade ago at the NGV, a piece from their spring/summer 2009/10 collection Doilies and Pearls, Oysters and Shells,” he tells GRAZIA.
“I was simply obsessed with the camp frivolity of it. But the germinal moment for this collaboration was Anna and Luke’s encounter with an exhibition I presented at Station (Gadigal Ngurra/Sydney) at the beginning of 2022 called This World Is Not For You. The process grew organically from there, through exchanging ideas and materials, and then hatching the plan to show the collection as a runway with the installation work itself.”
Where Romance Was Born ends and Yore begins is a Mobius strip of perspective. While previous collaborations by the brand, including with Ken Done and Del Kathryn Barton, had clearly defined lines of input, Sales, Plunkett and Yore seem so on the same page that the ideas of each are knitted as tightly as the crocheted squares that made up one of the dresses.
“I think we have a lot more in common than we originally thought,” says Sales. “Paul just let us do whatever we wanted really, and even painted a lot of the fabric and made earrings, we were mindful to keep our RWB signatures in there, but it was almost like we didn’t need to try both of our work crosses over really nicely.”
While Sales and Plunkett have never been ones to follow a zeitgeist, what was presented Stronger Together taps into a sense of urgency that’s building around notions of freedom. Whether’s that’s sexual, personal or political – and diverse cast of queer, First Nations and non-binary speaks directly to how these freedoms intersect – Yore’s subversive, often confronting, work that plays on sloganism and cultural pastiche was the perfect platform for this burgeoning new direction Romance Was Born seems to taking.
“[This political messaging]is a direct response to Paul’s work,” explains Sales. “It is so highly charged with this political spirit it’s something Anna and I really love about his work. For it to feel authentic it had to have something to say.
“It was also World Pride and it would have felt really wrong I think to use a cast of standard models, we do not want it to look like we are using an important time like pride to make it about us. It had to have a scene of community.”
Clothing became the tools to uproot our definitions and restrictions created by the myth of good taste. Playful, tacky, gauche, surreal, seductive – it was delirium in its finest form. Dresses made from the aforementioned crocheted squares ripped directly from your favourite grandmother’s house, tie-dyed harlequin jumpsuits, army fatigues adorned with feathers and sequins. A frothy, tiered gown spray-painted in neon shades and another made from multi-coloured brand logos.
Beneath all the neon and the rainbow, it’s impossible to miss the political conversation taking place, courtesy of Yore. For example, the familiar logos on closer inspection were subverted into political messaging, cultural jamming mass corporatisation with a social agenda. This was wearable dystopian pop culture.
“Much of my work draws critically upon the prevailing materiality and social conditions of neo-liberal consumer culture,” says Yore. “So on some level I am trying to capture the mood of alienation and vacuity in the dominant culture, and articulate the totalising nature of the economic system and socio-political context I find myself in.”
