For their spring ’25 collection Romance Was Born took over Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art pop-up bar and took it to the prom. Or a wedding reception, the kind their parents would have had in the 1980s, replete with a profusion of pink taffeta, baby’s breath, and balloons. Weddings are top of mind: Luke Sales and Anna Plunkett launched bridal in 2021, and since then have done a steady trade in custom pieces for brides-to-be that are made by hand, often using upcycled, heirloom fabrics like Venetian crochet. The duo found themselves returning to one 1994 film while making them. “We just kept making Muriel’s Wedding jokes and quoting lines from the film, and, like with a lot of the things we do, it started as a bit of a joke.”
For the uninitiated, P.J. Hogan’s Muriel’s Wedding is a kitsch, camp, wickedly funny cult hit beloved in Australia. It follows misfit, flawed Muriel escaping from her small town, and small-town mindset, to pursue her dream of being married. Heckled by the Queen Bees when she catches the bouquet—who tell her to throw it again as no one would marry her—Muriel goes on a clumsy, sometimes misguided journey to free herself from her roots. “The whole idea of coming of age, there was just so much about it that relates to me and also the business, and then it also talks to us working in fashion and aspirations,” said Sales, who will mark 20 years of the label next year.
With the assistance of the National Sound and Film Archive of Australia, and tapping into their signature humor and grace, the pair transposed film stills of Muriel, played by Toni Colette, onto opera coats and ball gowns. Salvaged wedding veils made up a fluttering skirt on a bustier dress with a profusion of pink taffeta bows. A faded cotton floral, used on a heart-shaped dress, was actually upcycled bed sheets à la Muriel’s. The peony of a tiered Swiss lace dress, meanwhile, was the color of her cassette player. The dress was embroidered with words by their long-time collaborator Meaghan Pelham (who was also writing love poems for attendees). All of it was corralled into a contemporary elegance despite the explosion of 1980s froth, something the pair have a knack for balancing. “We like to use the word posh—we don’t want it to feel like it’s not fashion.”
And there was more: a column dress strewn with white paillettes like confetti, a cocktail dress made entirely of strings of hearts. There was a complete absence of daywear, and Sales is unapologetic about this. “It’s definitely where we are as a brand and who we are.” The two are reigniting some wholesale accounts as of February, and are operating a successful pop-up boutique they hint could become permanent. That they’ve survived the ups and downs of a difficult industry and honed in on their riotously optimistic and unabashedly sentimental aesthetic is their own coming of age. As Sales notes: “It’s in the name.”
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