Australian Fashion: Past Present and Future

Romance Was Born is the contemporary Australian fashion house with a unique story telling vision. The renowned duo Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales met while studying fashion in 2005 and established the inimitable label Romance Was Born.

The pair is known for their ability to transform any theme or seemingly random inspiration into a glittery glimmering fashion paradise. Their collections are full of breathtaking statement pieces and feature; covetable prints, hand worked details of appliqué or embroidery, intricate beading and intensely detailed sequinned elements.

Romance Was Born is held in costume and textile collections nationally at the National Gallery of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum, The National Gallery of Victoria and the South Australian Museum. Internationally, they featured in the 2019 Summer show “Camp: Notes on Fashion” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Paul Yore completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. He is recognised for his multidisciplinary practice that includes embroidery, appliquéd quilts, banners, collage and installation through which he explores the politics of images, art history, religion, neo-liberal capitalism, celebrity, popular culture and queerness.

The Evacuation of Mallacoota utilises appliqué, assemblage and collage to layer imagery and text onto recycled fabric sourced from thrift shops and hard rubbish. As seen in many of Yore’s appliqué, collage and installation pieces, the work purposefully presents an almost overwhelming amount of detail that the artist sees as reminiscent of the visual excess of the post-internet media environment.

Honing in on details, The Evacuation of Mallacoota features several art historical sources, including photographs from a homoerotic book, ancient Egyptian funerary art, and Blue Nudes by Henri Matisse, which are deliberately mixed in with popular culture iconography such as The Wiggles, Winnie the Pooh and Tweety Bird. Taking cues from Dadaism and Punk, Yore’s repurposing of materials, images and text embeds issues such as the Black Summer disaster within a wider network of forces and interpolates the hidden histories held within repurposed items.

For more than 40 years of practice, Linda Jackson played a fundamental role in the development of a distinctly Australian approach to fashion design. Working as an artist outside the conventional fashion marketplace, she devised unique forms of clothing that evolved beyond the sphere of seasonal trends, defying the limits of Western fashion by drawing on an eclectic mix of influences from India, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Drawn from the National Gallery of Victoria Collection and the artist’s own archive, this exhibition features seminal works created by Jackson from the mid-1970s to the 1990s, including a number of rare and unique early pieces which embody the dynamic period during which she defined her style.

Key elements of Jackson’s innovative construction and decorative techniques are showcased, particularly fabric treatments involving appliqué, patchwork, screen printing, hand painting and cut work. This is the first major solo exhibition of Linda Jackson’s work to be exhibited in a public gallery and has been developed in close dialogue with the artist.