Goodbye girly chic

Heaven help you if you felt like buying a plain blue skirt or perhaps a nice beige bag because this season every single garment in every single shop comes in patterned cloth and bright colours, candy-coloured snakeskin or cowhide, sewn with sequins and adorned with ribbons.

This will go down in history as the season when more was definitely more, and when even those of us who only ever dared wear a little charcoal with a black suit suddenly came over all funny and started buying colourful bits and pieces as though the new term was going to start any day now.

If you're looking for people to blame you could start with Voyage, the fiercely trendy London shop which wouldn't let you in unless you were boho-chic enough and who added ribbon trim to everything. Designers who always tended towards the textured, girlie look (such as Elspeth Gibson, Marni, Tracey Boyd and Mathew Williamson) saw that their day had come, and produced collections which were manna to a fashion press and consumers who were becoming bored with the eternal merry-go-round of black to brown to navy - and back to black.

But this season, spring/summer 2000, it all came to a head with everyone in the fashion world seemingly agreeing that if it wasn't colour it wasn't moving. Joseph gave us little flowery pinnies and polka-dot dresses, and Sportmax sold Technicolor flowered hula-skirts with matching bikinis. Donna Karan made up candy-pink cotton into dresses with ruffled fronts; even Dries van Noten, the arch-deconstructionists, got all pretty with purple polka dots and lots of embroidery.

In the high street, the trend was even more noticeable. Branches of Oasis looked like florists as they produced yet more silk ornaments for us to stick in our hair. River Island matched the catwalks all the way with tie-neck blouses in every kind of polka-dot print. Warehouse went big on embroidery and silk while Monsoon - which had always specialised in beading, embroidery and lots of pretty, girly colours - had a field day.

Yet as the sales peter out and the new season's stock trickles into the shops, everyone is beginning to look at each other a little shamefacedly and wonder just how much longer this flirtation with "pink and pretty" is going to last. Girly is all well and good, but isn't fashion meant to be for grown-ups?

According to the experts, we can all relax because although fashion isn't going to go whizzing back to the monochrome and minimalist in one season, there are signs that maximalism is adopting a more mature approach. Karen Higgins, Brown Thomas's contemporary womenswear buyer, says: "Colour is still very much a part of next autumn. But while the collections do still have beading and embellishment and embroidery, it's not nearly to the same extent as this season." And Colette O'Leary, who buys the designer collections for Brown Thomas, agrees: "The silhouette is much more feminine, it fits close to the body . . . Beading will be staying to the evening side of things."

Instead of the candy palette of this season, autumn girls are going to be wearing a lot of rich wine and purple, reddish-brown, chocolate and camel. This is because these all go well with the colour of the autumn months - brazen, gilt-y gold. Gucci has sprinkled it liberally over its entire autumn/winter collection - it even has a gold leather coat - and we all know that what Tom Ford says, goes.

Prints are still making waves but they're getting more geometric and less whimsical, with arch girly label Marni opting for cubes instead of dots this season. The shirt and the blouse are particularly popular, with most designers doing a take on the tie-neck blouse and others, like high-street guru Karen Millen, going for a more wearable option that buttons up the front.

The other big retreat from the soft lines and pretty colours of the summer is that suits and tailoring are back in a big way. Derryn Mackey, owner and buyer for Khan in Blackrock, says: "We've bought into suiting in a big way. There are still little touches of colour but they're accents rather than a whole look . . . Next season isn't such a pretty season, but to be honest, a lot of people found this season very difficult to wear."

And there is the crux of the problem. It's likely that next season will see a massive return to sleek sophistication after the colourful playfulness of the last few months because, unfortunately, a lot of women just don't feel like playing any more. Colour, pattern, textures and prints are unlikely to disappear off the fashion menu altogether but they'll be playing a supporting role to slightly more serious dressing. It might soon be Back To School time, but next season it seems we want to dress more like the teacher and less like the senior infants.