The L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival swept the city, bringing with it an kaleidoscope of colour, style and panache.
This year’s L’Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival could have borne the tagline ‘bringing fashion to the masses’. The biggest public fashion event of its kind in Australia, it showed the season’s hottest, available garments in a runway format fit for international fashion weeks, it mixed the VIPs with the anybodies, and,in a serious coup for both the Festival and retailer Target, it brought one of New York’s finest designing talents Down Under to launch his exclusive line for the chainstore.
Staged at a sparkling new venue, on the waterfront at the city’s Docklands district, LMFF has clearly come a long way since its inception in 1997. Anchored by a superb line-up of seven L’Oréal Paris Runway shows, supported by a plethora of VIP events, and garnished with a diverse cultural program, there were so many sights, sounds and introductions to absorb in such a short time. Sixteen events, close to 100 designers’ collections, and countless glasses of champagne were eventually consumed by the Perth Woman team over the course of the seven day Festival.
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The big names of Aussie fashion were out in force for the first of the Runway shows. Sass & Bide, Jayson Brunsdon, Kirrily Johnston, Camilla and Marc and Leona Edmiston were only some of the labels to feature on the bill, displaying their autumn/winter offerings for the year, which are all in stores now. Little did we realise the key trends here would play again and again over the week like Groundhog Day: there were frills aplenty, sumptuous velvet, soft silks, metallic notions, bright block hues like tangerine and magenta, and a definite 70s influence by way of silhouettes and floral prints. However, the best statement dresses were not for sale, as show sponsor Harper’s BAZAAR commissioned each designer to create a gown fashioned from fabric printed with the magazine’s various covers in celebration of its milestone decade in publishing. Soon it was time to view the heir apparents at the LMFF Designer Award, which recognises up-and-coming Australian designers by giving them a hefty cheque and sending them to an nternational fabric fair. With past recipients going on to seeming greatness (Maticevski, Josh Goot and last year’s victor Yeojin Bae among them), Ben Pollitt will have a fair amount to live up to with his winning label, Friedrich Gray.
Day three brought a little familiarity to Melbourne by way of Perth’s premier couturier, Ray Costarella, who featured in the fourth Runway event. It was a decadent affair, highlighted by the beautiful, almost ethereal designs on offer from labels such as Gwendolynne, Fleur Wood, Nicola Finetti, Thurley and Aurelio Costarella. Costarella’s collection was the one shown just weeks before in New York – and the one that caught the eye of the ever-Posh Victoria Beckham and pop starlet Rihanna.
"The big names of Aussie fashion were out in force for the first of the Runway shows. Sass & Bide, Jayson Brunsdon, Kirrily Johnston, Camilla and Marc and Leona Edmiston were only some of the labels to feature on the bill, displaying their autumn/winter offerings for the year, which are all in stores now."
And then there was one: the Independent Runway show, which showcased a lengthy list of young, emerging fashion talent including Perth’s own Carly Hunter. Hunter deservedly won her place in the line-up during last year’s New Generation show at Perth Fashion Festival, and she displayed her brand of fashion pop pieces inspired, unusually, by lamp shades. Other notables were Gary Bigeni’s tucked jersey pieces, Silence Is Golden’s black-and-white offerings, and the model army finale, with soldiers clad solely in fashion’s favourite shade: black. Having substantially bettered 2007’s festival, it’s hard to imagine what LMFF 2009 might have in store for attendees.
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