Otherworldly Electric Romance on show at Fashion Week
If there was ever a label to celebrate otherworldly exuberance, it's Romance Was Born.
The Sydney label's Australian Fashion Week showing on Wednesday night, a collaboration with artist and performer Zaachariaha Fielding, took place on a runway clouded in mist.
Above hung three celestial bodies pockmarked with craters, as though the gravitational pull of the fashion on display could bring the cosmos a little closer to earth.
An award-winning painter and one half of the musical duo Electric Fields, the multi-talented Fielding recently represented Australia at the Eurovision song contest.
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All thoughts of Australia's exit in the first semifinal of the competition would surely have been left behind in the cosmic dust, overtaken by the evening's extraordinary fashion spectacle.
Fielding's idiosyncratic line and typically warm palette were both on show across voluminous garments featuring bright prints.
As ever, the label played with colour and volume - some garments were constructed from so much material as to render the usual descriptors entirely inadequate.
Even those in the coveted front row seats may not have been able to tell at times whether they were appraising a dress, a cape or a coat.
But the creative vision of designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales encompassed much more than outsized outfits.
One model sporting a look in white lace was a vision of absolute symmetry, suggesting nothing so much as a walking chandelier.
Another wore a red dress that appeared to be made from distended silk across the shoulders, creating a striking arc, before descending into lacy cutouts and a jagged finish.
It's almost 20 years since Plunkett and Sales famously turned down an internship with John Galliano to establish their own label in 2005.
Their collaboration with Fielding is surely a meeting of some of Australia's most creative minds - and an invitation to Planet Romance.