L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival

Grab your unbearably uncomfortable high heels, dress to impress and brace yourselves for the hoard of models, photographers and designers winding their way into our beloved city. Get ready kids, it's Fashion Week! And what a fashion week it's going to be, with this years L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival promising to be the most impressive yet. The program is stuffed as full as Megan Gail's wardrobe, with runways showing every night, more beauty workshops than you could poke a mascara stick at, pop-up shops and markets, business seminars for the more corporately (ahem, boring) inclined, a cultural program so cultural it could have been found in an Indiana Jones movie and for those with wallets a little on the light side, there's also a bunch of free events.Here are some of my picks for these fun fashion times ahead...

Well what better place to start than at the beginning? Enjoy all the glitz and glamour of the Opening Night Event, presented by David Jones and supported by Vogue Australia. This will be the first and largest runway show for the week and will feature some of Australia's leading designers, including Lisa Ho, Collette Dinnigan and Rachel Gilbert, who will be sending their latest collections down the line. If the incredible fashion wasn't enough for you perhaps the venue will draw you in. Melbourne's Docklands (usually filled with tumbleweeds) will be transformed, for the duration of the festival, into a lively and vibrant precinct, with live music playing in a range of riverside bars and restaurants and the popular L'Oreal Paris Powder Room on site. If you were lucky enough to score tickets to this baby, congrats. If not, feel free to join me in trying to jump over the barriers in order to get a seat. I'll be the crazy looking girl, dressed all in black and most likely being dragged away by security guards.

The L'Oreal runways are running all week, and some of particular interest are...well, actually, they're all pretty amazeballs to tell you the truth. There are great names all over the shop, with Runway 01 showing designers like Akira, Josh Goot and Willow, right through to L'Oreal Runway 07, which will give you a glimpse of Gorman, Secret South and Karen Walker. If you don't find at least one designer you like in a show then get out of my Country. Seriously.

If you find yourself a little challenged in the art of make-up application (ahem, like yours truly), fear not, because on Saturday the 23rd Marie Claire and the L'Oreal team have joined forces and are offering beauty workshops for those who don't know one end of the eyeliner to the other. Acquire essential tips and tricks of the trade to create runway-ready make-up looks in this guided one hour workshop, given by the best in the industry. Not only will you receive new skills from the make-up masters, but you'll also walk away with a L'Oreal Paris gift bag! #awesomefreestuff

For those looking for something a little on the cheaper side, and by cheap I mean free (students I'm looking at you), theres a great selection of free events on offer as part of this years cultural program. There's a public discussion between a panel of fashion, photography and cultural commentators, assessing the connection between androgyny, gender and fashion. Or perhaps you'd like to mix your fashion with your first position and check out the collaboration between dance and design in Ballet and Fashion, showing at the NGV. Fashion and film go hand in hand in the Inaugural Fashion Film Series, a national initiative that showcases short fashion films across Melbourne and Victoria.

So, whether your into Australian designers, high fashion, beauty, fashion collaborations between dance, music, food and films or up and coming designers, I can pretty much guarantee that there'll be something for everyone at this years L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. Jump online at www.lmff.com.au to check out the full program.