Collette Dinnigan Spring Fashions

Spring is the season the Dinnigan palette was made for. Collette Dinnigan built her label on romance — sexy romantic lingerie and incredibly detailed clothes since the 1990 launch, in French fabrics hand embroidered in India by highly skilled craftsmen — and spring is where that romance moves lightest: lace at its sheerest, prints at full bloom, lingerie style dresses needing nothing over them. This page follows the spring strand of her record in this guide.

The Photos section gathers spring looks across the label's history, and the search routes in the references run Collette Dinnigan spring fashion news, photo and video searches. Pair this page with the fall fashions page for the same world at autumn weight, and with the collections page for both seasons filed together. Her official website is linked in the references.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not this designer's own garments.

The Spring Register

Every label has a season that flatters it, and spring flatters a romantic. The three strands of her collections — lace, embroidery, print — are all spring natives: lace made to be seen in daylight, embroidery light enough for warm evenings, and the amazing prints her Sydney store became known for, at the scale and brightness the season invites. What the couture-level discipline of her making adds is control: the romance is engineered, prints matched at seams and embroidery placed so it survives a lighter ground, exactly as it did when the whole label was a single line of dry-clean only lingerie in 1990.

The lingerie style dress comes home in spring. The bridge piece of her collections — underwear's fabrics and finishes rebuilt at outerwear's standard — needs no layering in warm weather, and the spring photographs in the Photos section show it in its purest form: lace, skin and light, finished to the standard the 1992 Paddington store was opened to sell.

Spring on the Calendar

Her spring collections arrive through the calendar the fashion week page covers: presented, reviewed, and carried to the store that has anchored her retail record — William Street, Paddington, from 1992, and Queen Street, Woollahra, from 2011. For a Sydney label the spring season also carries a local poetry: spring in Sydney is the northern calendar's mirror, and her spring clothes meet their home clients in the season they were named for, on the other side of the world's fashion map.

Read with the runway page for the spring shows in sequence, and with the profiles page for the founding chronology — 1990, 1992, 2011 — that made the spring collections possible.

Photos