Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia has announced today via it’s Facebook that its SS12/13 outing will kick off with Romance Was Born’s Marvel comics inspired collection consisting of twenty-three different prints drawn from archival comics dating as far back as the 1940s.
Although tightly under wraps, designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales spoke with The Australian’s fashion editor Damian Woolnough last month on the collaboration: “We’ve always loved comics and have referenced them along the way in our work. We approached Marvel and the timing was right. We met with their chief executive who gave us the password to access all of their archives.”
The timing coincides with the Australian release date Marvel’s superhero gang bang The Avengers, which will be released here (before everywhere else) on April 25th, five days prior to the beginning of Fashion Week.
Plunkett stated that although the clothing and armour of superheroes were the starting point of the collection, “People shouldn’t expect us to take it too literally because we’re still fleshing it out.” After some serious investigative journalism (read: Instagramming), it’s almost, kinda, maybe safe to assume that at least two of the twenty three prints will be Black Widow and The Flash-inspired, so expect lightening bolts and/or red and black PVC graphic colour palettes. It’ll be the most print-heavy collection the duo have ever undertaken, with prints developed by Sydney designer Radge.
Unafraid of the fruits of collaboration, Plunkett and Sales have previously worked with Archibald-winning artist Del Kathryn Barton on prints for their Garden of Eden collection and more recently with The Sydney Theatre Company, designing costumes for Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness. With their penchant for show-stopping spectacle on the runway and unabashed theatricality in their collections, we definitely cannot wait to see what kind of ass-kicking, crime-fighting wonder women they’ve conjured for Spring/Summer 2012/13.
Portrait sans awesome design work with entire Marvel Cast by Candice Lake
Title Image by Ryan Pierse via Getty
