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31st May 2019
Rare is the opportunity to attend the Met Gala, where American Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour presides over the star-studded affair, curating the guest list and pairing designers with muses for the most important evening in the fashion year calendar.
Even more remarkable, then, is the chance to be included in the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition, which last year lured over 1.5 million eyeballs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and which lasts several months each year. Enter Romance Was Born: the brainchild of designer duo Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales is the first-ever Australian label to be featured in the Costume Institute’s exhibition, marking a celebration of camp—and a momentous celebration of national fashion—that is de rigueur in 2019.
Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Curated by Andrew Bolton and Wendy Yu, the yearly exhibition centres on a chosen theme from which new imaginations are born (designers interpret the theme on celebrities and models at the most anticipated red carpet of the year) and past renditions are brought to life, dug out from archives for all to see. 2019’s exhibition takes Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay Notes on Camp as its subject, where Sontag defines camp as a sensibility that is both ironic and humorous, pastiche and parody, frivolity and theatricality. Think Katy Perry dressed in a chandelier designed by Jeremy Scott or Lady Gaga revealing a series of ensembles by Brandon Maxwell in her impromptu performance.
Alongside designers including Virgil Abloh of Off-White, Alessandro Michele of Gucci and Jeremy Scott of Moschino, Australia’s own Plunkett and Sales have been enlisted to help bring this sensibility to life and round out what is sure to become the cultural talking point of the year and a historical moment in conversations moving art and fashion, taste and gender, forward.
“It’s such an honour; a career highlight we will always be grateful for,” the designers explain to Vogue. Speaking to the selection process, Plunkett and Sales illuminate: “They asked us to submit multiple costumes which were all one-off showpieces already owned by other institutions such as The Powerhouse Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria… To our advantage, and absolute delight, we had a second version of the piece they picked, which is currently archived at The Powerhouse. We’d made another piece using leftover plexiglass from the original. That is a one-off—very rarely do we create the same piece twice!”
Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The piece in question—an ensemble of coordinating jacket and skirt embellished with heart-like pieces of plexiglass rendered in multiple colours—is from Romance Was Born’s 2015 Cooee Couture collection, originally modeled on Indigenous Australian model Samantha Harris. Designed in collaboration with artist Linda Jackson, the spirit of the Cooee Couture collection set out to celebrate Jackson’s inherent flamboyance and fantasy—an embodiment of the artist that has come full circle this year, and is especially fitting for the Costume Institute’s camp theme.
“The design of the look came from the idea of recreating one of Jackson’s iconic prints from the 1980s,” Plunkett and Sales explain. “It is filled with motifs of broken hearts and small fragments of other materials… we visualise it like a map of Australia.”
Likening their look to the Australian landscape, the choice of this particular outfit for inclusion in the exhibit is not lost on either of the native designers. “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity for us and a wonderful compliment,” they emphasise. “We’re proud to celebrate the country we were both born in and continue to live in. Of course, we understand the importance of a global audience but it is so flattering to represent our country in this way.”
In the same breath, both designers highlight that Australian fashion is deeply inflected with a local camp sensibility, born of our proximity to the sea and the exaggerated stereotypes of our Australian character. “Beach culture and the Australian lifestyle have a certain camp sensibility at times, especially in the context of a lot of our great films like Muriel’s Wedding (1994). There is definitely a camp-ness to our reputation as well.”
And to the Romance Was Born woman, too, which like the designers’ identification of camp, is always injected with “a little something extra”. “We always say that [she] is not an age, she is an attitude; she’s a woman who appreciates the garment for reasons beyond trying to be sexy and cool.”
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Perhaps this is the interpretation of camp in 2019’s exhibition after all—taking hold of clothing and making it one’s own. As for the designers’ hopes for what viewers will take away from their featured look? “Excitement and a sense of love and pride.”