Romance Was Born ‘Berserkergang’ // Marvel Comics

First and foremost and completely unrelated to today’s post: Happy 70th Birthday Betsey Johnson!

Okay. I absolutely love when interests of mine join together and create something spectacular. It’s especially enjoyable when fashion designers collaborate with or are inspired by comic-books, fairy-tales, or movies. That is just what designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales decided to do with their label Romance Was Born. As its name suggests, the label is exuded with notes of creative expression. Plunkett and Sales met as peers and rivals while studying fashion in Sydney, Australia, moving forward to where they are now, with one of the most luminous and eclectic labels to have emerged from Australia in modern years.

For Australian S/S ’12 (our A/W ’12), the team partnered with Marvel to infuse new life into the comic world’s archives. Seriously, I can’t tell you enough how much I love when things like this fall into creation. Tim Gunn even participated in a few interviews with comic book/pop culture historian Alan Kistler to discuss the super-hero fashion of various comic-book characters. Now if Tim Gunn says they can make it work… well, you know it’s something amazing. With that said, the pair produced a collection that uniquely balanced the personalities of Marvel super-heroes with their own.

Plunkett and Sales spoke to Dazed Digital about their superhero dreams and explained what in the world ‘Berserkergang’ means:

DD: How did Berserkergang come about?

Anna Plunkett: We have always wanted to do a comic book themed collection. Marvel was the ideal partner for it; we had full access to their archives including the very earliest work. Berserkergang is a Norwegian word that means a warrior state of madness. It really resonated with how we saw the collection.

DD: The range has its obvious comic themes but everything still feels so you. How did you achieve this?

Luke Sales: We really wanted to make the prints hold their own and not rely too heavily on predictable comic themes that have been done before. There was so much influence in the collection from the worlds within the comics so reining it in was our biggest challenge.

DD: What keeps bringing you back to colour, print and general pizzazziness?

Anna Plunkett: Wow I love the word pizzazziness! Well I guess that’s just what Romance Was born is. We have always done colour and print in a really unconscious way, to us it feels normal. When we first started the label, prints weren’t something everyone was doing; now it feels quite saturated, so each collection we try and give it a new angle.

Luke Sales: Like with this collection, we really wanted to focus on the power of colour and not so much textured one off pieces.

DD: If you could be any comic book character, who would you be and why?

Luke Sales: The Silver Surfer. He can teleport, warp speed and light and can and handle extreme temperatures.