With spring just around the corner, it’s time to start pushing those trousers and heavy jumpers to the back of the closet in favour of some fun and flirty dresses. Whether you are heading to a garden party with friends or going out for a romantic date with your partner, the right dress is sure to help you turn some heads. Stay on trend this season by scooping up some of spring/summer 2013’s hottest dress styles and accessories. Here are just a few of my favourite looks:

1. The Sporty Dress:

This is one of SS13’s most wearable dress trends, the sporty dress gains its inspiration from the styles seen on the tennis court: scoop neck tops and flirty, above-the-knee A-line skirts. These athletic-inspired dresses look great in solid colours, so consider buying one in a chic black or navy or in one of this season’s hottest colours: poppy red, tangerine, pale pink, or violet. You can accessorise this dress with a wrist watch and a pair of trainers or sandal flats, and don’t forget to pull your hair into a low-hanging ponytail to complete the look.

This Periwinkle Cotton Estelle Dress below is a good example of this season’s sporty dress.

2. The Colour Blocking Dress:

The colour blocking trend provides women with the opportunity to dabble in new hues without overdoing the look. The basic idea is to pick two hues that contrast each other nicely—a neutral and a bright. If you want to give your look a little more complexity, add a third hue that is adjacent to your bright or directly opposite from it on the colour wheel, i.e. corals against mint, lilac against nectarine, or red against fuchsia. If your dress has three colours, choose accessories that match one of those shades; if it only has two, you have a little more freedom to play around with contrasting colours in your clutches and footwear choices.

This colour block pencil dress is a good example of the perfect dress for spring.

3. The Oriental Chic Dress:

This season, Oriental-inspired patterns and materials are trending big on the runways. Elegant high shine silks are the material of choice for modern party dresses, and they come bearing floral and bird patterns as well as intricate embroidery to give them a truly exotic aesthetic.

This cobalt blue kimono-style dress below looks fantastic when paired with some silver or beaded jade jewellery and a snake-skin clutch—a  perfect material for SS13.

Check out these spring dresses and more at Avenue 32.

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