Dream Weavers

The cool kids of British couture, Tamara Ralph and Michael Russo, plan to open a showroom in Hong Kong this year. The savvy young founders of Ralph & Russo talk to Chloe Street about their meteoric rise and rewriting the rules of couture

ON A TRIP TO LONDON a little more than a decade ago, Tamara Ralph, lost and not looking where she was going, collided with a stranger in Knightsbridge. The young Australian dressmaker, whose clients included a collection of Sydney’s rich and famous, and Michael Russo, a fellow Australian working in London, got to talking. Finding themselves still chatting in the same spot an hour later, they exchanged numbers. Ralph had to return to Sydney, but the pair began a long distance relationship and, a year after she got home, Russo gave Ralph a call. The financier had bought her a one-way ticket to London; would she come live with him? “She arrived three days later,” remembers Russo.