Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales met in the early 2000s as fashion students at East Sydney Technical College. In 2005, having turned down an internship with John Galliano at Dior to pursue their own work, they founded Romance Was Born. The name came from a badge Sales's cousin bought in Sydney's Chinatown.

The house produces couture and women's ready-to-wear and accessories, and has become known for clothes that, in its own words, "freely toy with the relationship between fashion and art". Its collections are exuberant, handcrafted and heavily embellished, often drawing on Australiana and on the country's popular and visual culture. Their stated aim is to "create immersive cultural experiences that provoke an emotional response".

Collaboration is central to the practice. Their first was with the Archibald Prize winner Del Kathryn Barton, and they have since worked with Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, Ken Done, the estate of May Gibbs and the artist Paul Yore, as well as with musicians including The Presets and Architecture in Helsinki. Beyond clothing they have designed wallpaper, furniture, installations, toys, and theatre and performance costumes. Commercial projects have included a 2008 capsule for Sportsgirl, rugs with Designer Rugs in 2017 and work with QT Hotels, Lego, Disney and Marvel; in 2020 they reissued a popular collection built on May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.

Museums have collected their work. The National Gallery of Victoria holds 13 pieces and the Powerhouse Museum three, including the Iced VoVo dress. In 2014 and 2015 the NGV staged Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids, and in 2019 their designs appeared in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition Camp: Notes on Fashion. In 2018 they published Romance Was Born: A Love Story with Fashion. In 2022 they shared the Sydney Theatre Award for best mainstage costume design, with Anne Cordingley, for Amadeus.

In 2025 the label turned twenty. Its anniversary collection, It's in the Trees, inspired by the Ballets Russes, was shown at Australian Fashion Week in May, and in July the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra unveiled a wall-sized photographic installation of the pair by their friend the artist Samuel Hodge, assembled from thousands of photographs taken over two decades. The gallery's director, Bree Pickering, called the label "very Australian, but ... globally influential". Their resourcefulness runs deep: the pair have staged shows built from offcuts and held workshops on making clothes last. "Before I even knew Anna, I used to go to op shops and buy secondhand clothing, unpick them, sew them back together," Sales told the ABC.

The anniversary collection began with a visit to the Ballets Russes archive at the National Gallery of Australia; "learning more about the Ballets Russes' collaborative way of working really struck a chord," Sales told 10 Magazine. It included gowns hand-painted by the artist Laura Jones, and the set was built from dead avocado trees rescued from clearance.

Their clothes have been worn by Cate Blanchett, Cyndi Lauper, Karen O, M.I.A., Grimes, Lily Allen and Miley Cyrus. Two decades on, Plunkett and Sales remain among the most distinctive voices in Australian fashion: maximalist, collaborative and resolutely local in their references.