The long, short and chic of it

The look of winter 2008 is crystalising at the L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival.

Halfway through Thursday, winter was locked in; a disparate mash of looks, admittedly, but as near to a formula as you're going to get from up-close-and-personal encounters with 60-odd catwalk collections.

They were modelled in the slickest fashion festival yet, in the biggest principal venue (Peninsula, Docklands) and the most elegant satellite venue (Prahran Town Hall). They were shown by the largest number of designers to what's presumed - though the tally isn't in yet - the most fashion-hungry punters in the festival's 12-year history.

In the evenings at Central Pier, as the sticky days cooled and a breeze sprang off a darkening Yarra, (blessed relief from the almighty pong of rotting seaweed that particularly afflicted the swank, VIP-only L'Oreal party boat moored at the dock), Melbourne's most fashionable - mainly women and girls - clattered onto the dock and clustered, kiss-kissing and gossiping, ready for the first show.

When they emerged an hour later from the massive, blackened Peninsula venue with its 45-metre catwalk, twisting silver panels and seating for 1400, the sun was dropping behind the Bolte Bridge, the city lights were winking on, and the Yarra was already glossy and black, ruffling gently, shot with burnished gold.

It was a splendid way to slide into a new season, one that has polarised again, into hard and soft silhouettes, short and long hemlines, simple minimalist and highly complicated layered looks.

It is a black season, and though there was much ado about "pops" of colour - cherry, purple, deep pink, magenta, even tangerine, pumpkin and mustard - the best interpretations for daywear were monotone.

Designers of dress-up frocks and co-ordinates - Jayson Brunsdon, Toni Maticevski, et. al. - did "pop" beautifully, or segue cleverly into pale, whipped cream silks for cocktail or flouncier fantastics, but for daylight hours the palette was almost unerringly sombre. (Read "sophisticated" if you like.)

Colour, when it did come into its own, was muted and mixed with black. Only a handful of collections showed the clashing mashes of plummy and autumn coloured prints and patterns, worn in layers of blouses, knits, tops, bottoms and tights that is rising strongly for Euro winter 2008-09.

The binding item in almost every collection, whether complicated, or deadly simple, was a coat. And yes, variations of the trench, whether stiff and structured, or slack and soft, did manifest ad nauseam. But the knitted coat - Country Road's double-buttoned wrap in a swampy waffle knit was a corker - and a variety of sweet and shapely frock coats, often with shawl collars, self belts and generously gathered near-rara skirts, were the bull's-eye components for winter's key layered looks.