The Romance Was Born Spring 2026 collection arrived not via a runway, but through a museum archive and a furniture refurbishment programme, which is, honestly, very on-brand for a label that has never been remotely interested in doing things the straightforward way.
Sydney-based designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, who founded Romance Was Born in 2005, skipped Australian Fashion Week’s traditional show format this season. Instead, they took their extravagantly embellished sensibility to Melbourne Design Week, partnering with Cultivated, the in-house sustainability arm of Cult Furniture.
What Cultivated Actually Does
Cultivated officially launched at Melbourne Design Week in 2021, described as a programme eight years in the making. It operates as a product stewardship scheme: buying back, refurbishing, and recycling authentic designer furniture rather than sending it to landfill. The collaboration with Romance Was Born saw those reclaimed pieces dressed in the duo’s signature language of feathers, embroidery, and colour so concentrated it borders on aggressive. The result was an exhibition rather than a catwalk, each garment in conversation with the object beside it.
‘It was an exciting project,’ Sales said over Zoom. ‘It’s something we’ve always wanted to do. We did a really amazing show last year for our 20th anniversary, and decided to focus on [Design Week] instead.’
Seasonal collections, for anyone anxious, are not going anywhere. The Spring 2026 line exists; it just had a more idiosyncratic launch vehicle than most.
Romance Was Born Spring 2026: The Art Deco Thread
The studio’s location inside the Powerhouse Museum Sydney is, as studios go, rather useful. Plunkett and Sales have access to a wide breadth of historical textiles, and for this collection the primary pull was handmade Art Deco wallpaper attributed to Auguste Thomas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an album of designs by Auguste H. Thomas, a French designer whose geometric motifs, birds, and flowers sit squarely in the Art Deco vocabulary. The Alden and Vada Dow collection further documents Thomas’s animal, floral, and geometric designs as typical of the Art Deco and Art Nouveau periods, which gives you a reasonable sense of the visual territory Plunkett and Sales were moving through.
That reference point fed directly into the collection’s textures. Slender bias-cut dresses made from vintage Italian bedspreads, some caped, some sleeveless, feathered trims, and evening gloves carried the feeling of modern antiquity. The embroidered patchwork jacket with a fuchsia feather collar that visually echoed the upcycled couch beside it was not a coincidence. Sales explained that the collection was shot inside the Powerhouse Museum specifically so the garments could ‘talk to the furniture.’
Not everything was rooted in the archive. An embellished denim pencil skirt paired with flannel, and a mod mini styled over coral tights, kept one foot firmly in the present. The range across a single collection, from vintage-bedspread bias cuts to statement denim, is part of the duo’s method rather than a contradiction in it.
Twenty Years In, Still Building Worlds
The Powerhouse connection runs deeper than studio space. The museum has documented a collaboration between Romance Was Born and musician Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes), describing Khan as a long-time collaborator and friend of Plunkett and Sales. The brand’s relationship with cultural institutions is not new or incidental; it is structural.
That institutional reach has produced work that sits in permanent collections. The National Gallery of Victoria holds the label’s ‘Rainbow tartan feather suit’ from the 2015 spring ‘Coo-ee couture’ collection, credited to Plunkett and Sales. From museum collection to museum studio to Melbourne Design Week exhibition: the trajectory has a logic to it, even if the path is deliberately, gleefully strange.
Sales summed up the worldview plainly: ‘There is kind of a weird humor in what we do.’ After two decades, that weird humour has accrued a body of work that ranges from gallery walls to furniture exhibitions to Art Deco-referencing eveningwear made from repurposed Italian bed linen. The next question is whether the Design Week format becomes a fixture, or whether the runway calls them back for autumn.
