Former Chief Stewardess Randi Barry created her fashion brand Bravo x Romeo while working on yachts. Now she’s showing at Paris Fashion Week.
Long before she’d ever heard of prestigious French fashion houses or the Parsons School of Design, Randi Barry was a little girl in rural British Columbia who loved clothes.
“I remember being very young and drawing really unique shoes that I’ve never seen before and putting on little fashion shows for my mom in the kitchen when she was cooking,” Barry said. “I remember dressing my sister up in all these clothes, and I used to love playing dress up and having tea parties.”
That love of fashion grew during her childhood and teen years, but she couldn’t afford pricy clothes. She believes that strengthened her passion.
“I grew up extremely poor and we didn’t have much growing up, which is part of the reason I got into fashion,” said Barry, who grew up in beautiful but sparsely populated Comox Valley, across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver. “There’s points in my life where I remember only having one pair of trousers, and I started sketching out my outfits because I was being made fun of at school for wearing the same pair of pants every day.”
Today, that childhood love has become a career. Barry’s fashion brand, Bravo x Romeo, hosted its first fashion show in 2022 on board a mansion yacht at the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show (FLIBS). In October, she’s set to unveil its latest resort wear collection at Paris Fashion Week. Between that childhood spent sketching and present day on Paris catwalks, there was also a time spent as a chief stewardess on yachts. For Barry, it’s all been part of the journey.
That journey’s course was confirmed in college, where Barry made the decision to pursue fashion. Helping create a college fashion show cemented the direction she wanted to head, and although she graduated with a double bachelor’s degree in graphic design and fine art, she wanted to explore fashion.
Fashion school was the next step for Barry. After being accepted into a certificate program at the prestigious Parsons School of Design’s European campus, Parsons Paris, she was left with one dilemma – how to pay roughly 30,000 euros in tuition fees.
“I asked them to defer for a year and I just did some research about what the fastest way you can make money in the shortest amount of time is,” Barry said. “And I found yachting.”
Fortunately, Barry already had fine dining experience through a summer job working at Dent Island Resort. Barry also had become a sail trainer, receiving her STCW and gaining valuable work experience sailing from Liverpool to the Black Sea. Her previous experiences, along with the money she could make in yachting, led Barry to apply for a yacht stewardess position in Savannah, Georgia.
“I applied online and got this job – and to be honest, at first I thought it was a joke. They’re going to fly me out to Savannah and pay me $3,000 a month? This isn’t real,” she said.
The position was real, and Barry rose the ranks to chief stewardess while working on 50-plus meter vessels – saving every penny she made for fashion school.
“I was the most boring person,” she said. “I would never go out drinking with the crew, or do anything.”
Barry’s time as a stew helped her save for fashion school, but it also helped in more unexpected ways. She learned how to take care of various types of garments. A stew and a room full of laundry are a pairing some view as a tedious part of stew work, but for Barry it was a time to work with high-end pieces of clothing she had never worked with before.
“Working with (clothing by) a high-end designer, seeing how they’re made, even just opening up the inside of a t-shirt, it’s so different from the clothes I grew up with that I had access to,” she said. “Steaming them, pressing them, repairing them, how you launder them, all of those things really changed my relationship with fashion.
After saving enough for school, Barry took her place at Parsons Paris. She interned at Paris Fashion Week, working backstage for French luxury fashion house Kenzo. After graduating, Barry went back to the yachting industry and met her husband, Capt. Daryn Dalton.
Barry eventually moved ashore and went through her U.S. green card process, which required her to stay in the country. Although she couldn’t work in yachting for this time, she continued to work on Bravo x Romeo. She had been developing her brand while working on yachts, but the process wasn’t always the smoothest.
“It started with me sewing everything myself, and you know, they say in order to be really good at something you have to suck at it first, and that is so true,” Barry said. “I’m just so grateful for all of my customers that have been with me from the beginning because my pattern started out very basic.”
The first dress Barry created for Bravo x Romeo got noticed when Francesca Rubi wore it in season eight of Below Deck.
“That really helped my brand a lot, getting recognition and people were messaging me asking where they could get the dress from,” Barry said.
As Bravo x Romeo grew, Barry made sure it grew in the way she wanted it to in terms of business ethics and sustainability. Garment workers who work for her worldwide are paid living wages, Bravo x Romeo uses natural and biodegradable fibers, and she does not make an excess of anything she creates.
Bravo x Romeo turned heads during her first fashion show at FLIBS 2022, and earlier this year she showed her resortwear collection, “High Seas,” at Miami Swim Week. When she takes her line to Paris Fashion Week in October, it’s going to mark a milestone in her journey.
“It is going to be a melding and combination of everything that I am as a designer and my history coming together at a place where I studied fashion, which just means so much to me,” Barry said.
As Barry continues to actualize her fashion dreams with Bravo x Romeo, she looks back at the young girl that turned her kitchen into a runway and the yacht stewardess that turned down nights out for school funds, knowing she is doing exactly what they both wanted.
“Sometimes my life has felt so random,” she said. “But in those moments you realize, ‘Ok, this is all for something.’”
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