Montreal's Crescent Street is a legendary downtown Montreal locale. To some, it is the place to be... loaded wall to wall with terrasses of the bar, resto and club kind, it is an impressive stretch of road. To the more sensitive among us, it's the Eurotrash meat market strip. It's the street they close off in the summer during F1 racing week, only to fill it with racecars and hot models in painted-on, branded bodysuits. (You can gauge whether you fit into the latter or the former opinion by whether that impresses or disgusts you.)

I had the lucky pleasure one evening last week of being above Crescent Street. Literally. On the verge of summer, no less.

I was safely ensconced with friends, champagne and a generous amount of whiskey on a balcony in Crescent Street's Hotel Chateau Royal, where we gleefully picked apart the scenes in progress seven storeys below (it just so happened that my friend was booked into a hotel there by his publisher, not by choice. We are of the "sensitive" category mentioned above).

The young, overly-tanned, overly-long-legged, overly-dyed women. The big drooling men. The older, overly-tanned women with the overly-little dogs in the overly-big purses and cougar-print accessories. a full-out brawl in the street that rivaled West Side Story. An endless parade of the worst of fashion fads past, present and future.

What stayed constant throughout the night was the repetition of the colour pink. Now, some have said that pink is the new black. While there was a lot of black, the percentage of pink was remarkable. I've yet to form an opinion on the return of the colour. I've been wearing splashes of pink for years (it made an earlier comeback in the world of graphic design, and I've been trying to push it in print for a while now).

Pink: It's not just women, and it's not just pink. It's Baby-Pink, Dusty Rose, Hot-Pink, Fuschia and more. You'll even find many a suit-and-tie guy -- from 14 to 45 -- in pale pink collars-and-cuffs this season, but for women it's fuschia fuschia fuschia. From head to toe, in some cases. In sporty sweats or miniskirts, on Crescent this fine evening.

Top two outfits of the night: a Johnny Knoxville lookalike in big, pink-tint shades and a Dusty Rose sweater-vest, and Pink-Girl... red tints in her hair, hot pink terry-cloth tube top, matching miniskirt and white legwarmers (to offset the glut of pink). Unfortunately, they were not together.

After the smashing of bottles and the hooting of the drunken masses had subsided, the street held a quiet pre-dawn charm of a ... actually, no it didn't. But it was a satisfying piece of theatre anyway. (And a profitable study in pink.)