Home Fashion Melbourne Fashion Festival ready to frocks up

Melbourne Fashion Festival ready to frocks up

Fashion meets history and commerce next month when the Melbourne Fashion Festival frocks up in its new home in Carlton's Melbourne Museum Plaza. The L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion festival is a unique which offers trend in design, business and innovation and brings the retails and the consumer face to face. The fashion fest will run from March 4 to 10, 2007 in a huge exhibition area between the Melbourne Museum and the Royal Exhibition building. Sandwiched between the museum and the Royal Exhibition Building, the festival's home will be an architecturally designed "fashion cube" with an extended catwalk. Giant screens will provide live feeds to the outside public of catwalk shows featuring leading Australian designers such as Toni Maticevski, Willow, Sass & Bide, TL Wood and Morrissey. This year's theme is "modern chic", signalling a move away from the stale boho trend in favour of more structured, elegant looks — "progressive, innovative and fresh," as festival director Karen Webster described it. Now in its 11th year, the Melbourne Fashion Festival has been joined on the social calendar by a burgeoning number of fashion festivals including Australian Fashion Week and Melbourne Spring Fashion Week. More than 200,000 people were expected to attend next month's L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Mr Bracks said. "Two hundred thousand people is double the crowd that can fit into the MCG ... that's the scale and scope of this festival," he added. He said the event had grown dramatically since 30,000 people attended the shows, parties and catwalk events of the original festival in 1997. This year they have managed to lure British fashion and homewares designer Jasper Conran, along with Jan Sheperdson, brand director of London high street success story TopShop. The Stella McCartney for Target range will be unveiled at the festival, the latest in the encouraging trend of top-end designers creating affordable clothing ranges. A cultural program will also present more than 30 fashion-related exhibitions, events and forums during MFF week, many of them free. "The beauty of the festival is that it mixes emerging, independent designers through to the large retail chains in fashion," said Ms Webster. "It makes fashion accessible to everyone." The organizers are anticipating to excite and inspire the audience as it has done every year for the last decade.

 

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