It's Madrid Fashion Week - and that can only mean one thing. Or, pedantically put, a handful of things.

New York, London, Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks are but a stone's throw away in calendar terms, concertina-ing over the next month or so and New Zealand Fashion Week started today.

Madrid unfolded over the weekend and will wrap up today. In typically Spanish style, many of its designers come at fashion with irreverence - and colour and passion in spades.

It follows, then, that there is no shortage of references to sun-kissed, matador-soaked, flamenco-spun history in the S/S 2013 collections, from furtive glances at a colourful past to full-frontal embraces of the culture that so typifies Iberia.

Onlookers have been treated to snatches of bare skin, sheer blouses unashamedly proffering nipples, off-the-shoulder tops and flamboyant prints, not to mention the wackier sides of playful style.

Taking it one step further, Maya Hansen sent models down the runway as spitting images of unibrow queen of Latina art, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo.

Here, we bring you the best of the region's style palette - and a mixed, bold bag it is, too.