“It was never a question of coming back—it would be more of a question about when,” says Tamara Ralph, the designer and founder of her namesake couture label. Having previously been half of Ralph & Russo (yes, the couture brand behind Meghan Markle’s engagement dress), the Australian designer is no stranger to haute couture. A graduate of Melbourne’s Whitehouse Institute of Design, she made a strategic move to Europe in 2005 to start her career as a designer.
“Growing up in Australia [in the 1980s and 90s], it was a very different industry there than it is now, as a luxury market and as a fashion market. So I always knew that I wanted to be in Europe, and moving there was quite a definitive step. The European fashion scene was quite removed from Australia at that particular time,” Ralph recalls. “I moved completely over to the other side of the world, where I knew nobody, I had no family, no