Virginia Martin could be the new Coco Chanel. Or a future Collette Dinnigan. The fresh-faced finalist in the National Designer Award certainly looks the part: excruciatingly chic in layers of smoke-coloured linen, shiny hair long enough to sit on, and not a skerrick of makeup on that fashionably lovely face.

Martin's talent for precisely cutting and weighting fabric to drop elegantly and kink flatteringly for her fashion brand Bul (rhymes with "Cull"), is also wonderfully Chanel-esque.

"It's the textural depth and that smooth fall," she says, referring to one particular frock, "But, I had to use a polyester to get it."

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It's the first time in Bul's four years she's mixed a synthetic in with the usual cottons, linens, pure blends and leathers. "But it had to be perfect." And, so it is: a sharply cut, fleshy to the touch, clean calf-grazing drop of dark blue plaid inspired by Scotland's culture and coastline.

In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking, after a flick through the Bul pod collection entered in Australia's richest fashion award, that Martin's a shoo-in to win. But the judges' decision, to be announced Monday as part of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, is considerably harder than that.

Martin is a sophisticated designer with international experience (Cynthia Rowley, Heatherette, Proenza Schouler), five eponymous stores and a long list of wholesale stockists including Myer, but these aren't unusual achievements among finalists for the award.

This year, her second as an award finalist, Martin is up against the equally sophisticated "neo-luxe" daywear of Melbourne brands Verner and Pageant and Sydney-based brand MacGraw, and the clever, whimsical niche brand by another Sydneysider, Emma Mulholland.

Though it was established with the first festival 19 years ago to discover Australia's Next Big Things barely out of college, the award has evolved into a jumping-off point into fashion stardom for established "unknowns".

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Last year's winners, Mario-Luca Carlucci and Peter Strateas of Strateas-Carlucci, for example, were already hot in Australia and selling well out of Paris when they accepted the cash prize, a trip to New York and business mentorship packages worth more than $100,000. They went on to win both women's and men's categories of Australia's leg of the international Woolmark Prize.

Other recent award winners, Dion Lee, Yeojin Bae, Toni Maticevski and Romance Was Born, are also heavily inked into fashion editors' and buyers' contact books in Europe, the US and Asia.

This year, whether they win the award or not, the challenge for Martin and her fellow finalists will be to keep abreast of fashion's increasingly complicated luxury-hungry market without the benefit of being a globally-known brand.

"They want that luxury look, but also pricing's got to be accessible," Martin says. "And I have customers from young to late 60s too so, different body shapes…"

The Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival continues until next Sunday.