Plutonic Rainbows

This Fall 1989 advertisement looks, at first glance, like evidence of a forgotten Escada experiment. The gold script says “just looking,” the Escada name sits beneath it, and the clothes have all the house signatures: hard shoulders, gold hardware and a black-and-white pattern busy enough to make restraint seem faintly rude. I thought Just Looking might have been a softer retail format, devised to make Escada less intimidating during its frantic international expansion. The company had floated in 1986 and was opening stores in Europe and America from 1987, so the timing made sense. Escada's own advertising that season gave the house name the dominant type. The evidence points somewhere else.

The picture itself encourages the confusion. It isn't a photograph of a shop front or an invitation to visit a new kind of salon. It is a conventional fashion advertisement, with the model occupying nearly the full height of the page and the retailer's practical details pushed into the black margin. Just Looking's identity is written like a signature; Escada's arrives as a product stamp. The hierarchy is commercial rather than corporate.

Just Looking was an independent boutique in Laguna Beach, California. The small print in the advertisement gives the location and the telephone number, 714/494-8208. The shop's current visitor listing still carries the same 494-8208 number and names Heshmat Shirazi as its owner. It describes a local business selling clothing from designers around the world, not a former branch of a German fashion group.

The dates make the Escada theory harder to sustain. In official Laguna Beach planning minutes from 2017, Efy Shirazi identified herself as Just Looking's original owner, while one customer said she had shopped there for 42 years. That places the boutique around 1975, before Margaretha and Wolfgang Ley founded Escada. A 1991 Los Angeles Times report is clearer still: Behjat Shirazi, manager of Just Looking in Laguna Beach, discussed buying at the Los Angeles design mart and said the store carried mostly European lines. Escada was one of those lines, not the landlord.

The mistake is easy to make because the advertisement lets both identities occupy the same page. Just Looking gets the flourish and the phone number; Escada supplies the clothes, the season and the authority. This was how a strong independent boutique advertised before every label controlled its own digital storefront. The retailer's name could be as prominent as the maker's, because customers had a relationship with the shop as well as with the clothes.

The quieter history belongs to the Shirazi family, who built a Laguna Beach boutique durable enough to outlive the decade, the area code and Escada's boom. “Just looking” probably did soften the threshold of a high-end shop, since the phrase is what wary customers say when a salesperson approaches. But that charm belonged to the retailer itself. In 1989, the name above the door was strong enough to share a page with Escada and keep the larger type.

The lost world of late 80s and early 90s Escada, the era of Margaretha Ley, glossy boutiques, power suits, and those highly polished advertising campaigns​​​​​​​​​​ that have become almost hauntological relics of a vanished luxury culture.

Included Fable 5 access on paid plans ends tonight, July 12, at 11:59 Pacific. The model doesn't vanish then, it just moves behind the meter, charged at ten dollars per million input tokens and fifty out, exactly twice what Opus 4.8 costs. So the question worth asking isn't whether Fable survives. It's whether OpenAI shipping GPT-5.6 to the public on July 9 changes what Anthropic does next.

My guess is no. The pressure everyone expects from a cheaper public rival lands on Sonnet and the next Opus, the models Anthropic sells at volume. Fable was never in that price fight, and a cheaper GPT-5.6 won't drop it into one now. It costs twice Opus for a reason.

The force that actually reshaped Fable this summer wasn't OpenAI at all. The US government switched the model off in June, and gated GPT-5.6 to about twenty approved partners when it first shipped, weeks before its public launch. Both labs spent the summer negotiating with the same office. Competition wasn't the variable. The regulator was.

So expect the dull outcome. Fable stays where it landed when it came back, a metered premium tier priced like the halo it is, with no reason to cut it and no path back into the plans. GPT-5.6 going public is a real event. It just isn't Fable's.

A sample vial is in the post, and until it lands I only have other people's noses to go on. Gibeon is the seventeenth Xerjoff Shooting Stars perfume, out since late January, and every coffret ships with a certified chip of the meteorite it's named for, iron that fell on the Namibian desert.

The reviews line up unusually well. Neroli and soft Ceylon cinnamon on top, Tuscan orris doing the heavy lifting in the heart, rose beside it, a camphoraceous patchouli a few people swear is louder than the brand admits, then vanilla and tonka underneath. Almost everyone reaches for the same word, powdery, and right after it, vintage, as though this were a Guerlain that got made in 2026.

The presentation leans hard into the concept, gold glass cradled in dark rock against a starfield, a real meteorite fragment tucked in the box.

That's a lot of ceremony for a soft, close-wearing floral, and powdery orris can go either way, quiet luxury or a grandmother's compact. "Vintage-elegant" sometimes just means "smells like something I already own," which puts it at the opposite pole from the spiced-amber powerhouses I usually reach for. The performance, at least, is less contested: twelve hours, a two-foot cloud, stronger on a shirt than skin. I'll know soon enough.

In November 1991, Estée Lauder ran a full-page advertisement in American Vogue that broke the house's usual formula. Instead of a lone woman gazing past the camera, the frame held two people in profile, foreheads almost touching, a man's hand pushed into a woman's hair. Across the bottom, in gold Art Deco capitals, sat one word: Spellbound. The tagline promised "the intense magic of falling in love," and for once the picture tried to show the falling rather than the woman doing it alone.

Lauder in 1991 was not a company that needed to gamble. By some counts it held close to half of the American prestige cosmetics market, a dominance no rival came close to matching. Leonard Lauder, Estée's older son, was president and chief executive, and he ran the fragrance side on a theory he liked to state plainly: "Our fragrance advertising sold romance and prestige. You can't sell romance with an anti-wrinkle cream." Scent, in his telling, was the thing that pulled a woman into the whole Estée Lauder world and kept her buying everything else in it. A year earlier he had hired Robin Burns to run the American business, poaching her from Calvin Klein, where she had grown the cosmetics arm from six million dollars to two hundred million on the back of Obsession and Eternity. She knew exactly how to sell a bottle as if it were a narcotic.

Spellbound arrived on a schedule. Beautiful had launched in 1985 as a bridal bouquet, Knowing in 1988 as a mossy chypre, and Spellbound completed a kind of trilogy, each release a notch more nocturnal than the last. The house was building fragrances the way a studio builds a franchise, and by the early nineties it had the distribution and the trained counter staff to make almost any launch land. What it wanted from Spellbound was heat.

The campaign was willing to be unusually literal about that. You can see it in that near-kiss between the male model Nick Constantino and Julie Anderson, the two of them pressed close in grainy black and white, less a perfume ad than a film still from the second before a kiss. The following year the house swapped Anderson out and put Paulina Porizkova in the woman's place, the Czech supermodel who had been a face of the brand since 1988. Constantino stayed. The romance survived a change of leading lady.

The juice inside the gold bottle earned the drama. Spellbound is an amber-spicy oriental, and it wears like Beautiful after dark: the same floral bones dragged down into warm amber and clove, with a green, almost cold hit of lily of the valley sitting up top. It was loud. It crossed a room and hung there for hours, which in 1991 was the point rather than the problem.

It sold well, and then something more interesting happened to it. A later reformulation thinned the original out, and the people who had loved the first version turned into a small, stubborn resistance, hoarding vintage bottles and warning each other off the new one. That reaction is usually the mark of a fragrance that meant something to somebody. Estée Lauder still sells Spellbound today, though it was pointedly left out of the 2024 Legacy Collection that brought back Azurée, Knowing, White Linen and two others under Frédéric Malle's supervision. The scents chosen for that revival were the museum pieces; Spellbound, apparently, sits a rung below.

As for influence, I would be careful. Spellbound didn't start a trend so much as end one. The big spicy orientals had ruled the late eighties, from Opium to Obsession to Coco, and within three years of Spellbound's launch the market lurched hard the other way, toward the clean nothing of CK One and the aquatics that trailed it. Spellbound reads now like one of the last confident sentences in a language that was about to fall out of use, a powerhouse turning up just as powerhouses stopped being wanted. Its real legacy is smaller and more durable than a trend: a reference point perfume people still reach for when they need to describe what warm, spiced amber is supposed to smell like.

Some labels from the early nineties left catalogs, licensing fights, and a Wikipedia page. Request Jeans left mostly this: a black-and-white campaign shot in 1991, a wordmark set in orange serif, and a founding date logged in a corporate database. That date is 1987, and the company did the unglamorous work of wholesaling men's and boys' apparel to department stores. That's about all the record agrees on.

The picture is more ambitious than the paperwork. A sheer black mesh top is pulled over bare skin. The hair is teased enormous and lit from behind. The model holds her hands crossed at her mouth, as if she's deciding whether to speak, and the whole thing reads like a fragrance ad rather than something folded on a table at a suburban mall. I can't tell you who shot it or who she is, and neither can anyone else. She's one more face from a campaign nobody thought to caption. The styling is pure 1991: high-waisted denim, a top you can see straight through, and lighting lifted from the Herb Ritts school of expensive monochrome. It's the soft, backlit look Tom Ford would strip out of fashion imagery within a few years.

Request lived in the crowded middle of the denim market, under Calvin Klein and Guess, above the anonymous store five-pocket. That middle was huge back then, and it's exactly where brands go to be forgotten. Nobody writes the history of the label your cousin actually wore. The premium names got the museum retrospectives and the reissues; the workaday ones got liquidated, relaunched under new owners, or quietly dropped.

Request managed, at least once, to spend like it belonged higher up the ladder. The jeans are almost incidental in its own ad. You buy the mood, the hair, the hush of that raised hand, and somewhere down near the hem, the denim.

Heather Stewart-Whyte meets the camera in close-up, wrapped in olive silk printed with grapes, crests and small geometric panels. The scarf is less an accessory than the whole environment. Only a white sleeve and square gold earring interrupt it. The November 1991 issue of American Vogue carried Gucci advertising from this campaign. I like that the image doesn't pretend to announce a revolution.

Gucci hadn't yet become the shorthand for sex and hard glamour that would define it four years later. The house was trying to recover its authority after family disputes, careless licensing and too many products had weakened the name. Dawn Mello had arrived from Bergdorf Goodman in 1989 to impose discipline. Tom Ford joined in 1990, initially working on women's ready-to-wear. The famous red velvet trousers, satin shirts and Halston-lit confidence still lay ahead.

The picture's richest decision is restraint. A print this busy could easily have become an exercise in conspicuous luxury, but the framing denies it room to spread. Instead, Stewart-Whyte's direct gaze fixes the page. Her hair moves in large, deliberate curls; her expression doesn't. Gucci's name sits at the bottom in white, almost detached from the garment it is meant to identify.

Stewart-Whyte was well suited to this version of the house. She had the strong, clean features of the early 1990s model generation, but she could make polish look severe rather than sweet. The advertisement asks her face to control the ornament. That tension gives the image its charge: old-world motifs gathered around a woman who looks entirely contemporary.

I find it difficult now to see any early-1990s Gucci image without reading Ford's later success backwards into it. Yet this isn't the Gucci of the unbuttoned shirt and velvet trousers. WWD's archive places Ford's official debut as head designer in 1991, while Mello was still directing the broader recovery. Their task was not simply to make a good collection. They had to persuade people that Gucci could produce fashion, not merely trade on loafers, handbags and a famous double G.

The advert feels transitional in a precise way. Its silk print and gold hardware speak the established language of an Italian luxury house, while the crop, the hair and Stewart-Whyte's composure pull it towards the decade forming around it. Nothing here predicts the fever of 1995: no nightclub fantasy, no exposed skin, no calculated provocation. Gucci is still deciding how much of its past to wear, and Stewart-Whyte holds all that ornament steady with one unblinking look.

In this pale, close-cropped portrait, Paulina Porizkova looks almost detached from the ESCADA advertisement beneath her. The short layered hair and sidelong glance belong to 1995, while her face carries the authority accumulated during the previous decade. The clothes are reduced to a cream shoulder. ESCADA has bought recognition and given it nearly the whole page.

The advertisement ran on pages 8 and 9 of the December 1995 American Vogue. It still bears the name “ESCADA Margaretha Ley,” three years after Ley's death, as if the founder might be kept present through typography. The restraint is striking beside the yellow silk and black flowers that ESCADA had advertised in the same magazine in 1988. That earlier picture made abundance look like a business plan. Here there is cream embroidery, a pearl earring and Porizkova's face, everything else edited away.

That quietness can look like a premonition of ESCADA's fall. It wasn't. The trouble had already arrived: contemporary reporting described the company as in marked decline by 1992, the year Ley died. Rapid expansion had left it heavily in debt; company histories record losses approaching DM120 million in 1992 and more than DM37 million in 1993. ESCADA sold its stake in St. John Knits, restructured and tried to pull itself back toward the core brand.

By 1995 the house was not simply dying. It was building ESCADA Sport and its accessories business, while buying the expensive visibility of a model whose Estée Lauder years had made her face almost synonymous with polished beauty. The campaign can therefore be read as evidence of recovery as easily as decline. Or perhaps of the peculiar halfway state in which a brand has lost its momentum but can still purchase the appearance of command.

Porizkova was thirty here, hardly at the end of a working life. Her beauty hasn't become less forceful. It has become slightly disobedient to the advert: the eye moves to her expression and stays there, while ESCADA's name waits below for some of that certainty to transfer. I wouldn't call the image iconoclastic. It doesn't smash the old icon. It hires her, crops tightly, and hopes the icon can hold the company together.

ESCADA eventually filed for insolvency in 2009, amid the global recession and after a failed bond rescue. This advertisement belongs to an earlier, stranger stage: the company is still grand enough to hire Porizkova, yet unsure enough to ask her face to do the work its clothes once did.

In this December 1995 advertisement, a woman sits in long grass with a brown leather bag between her knees. No evening dress, city pavement or lacquered shop interior. The palette runs from oatmeal to mud, and the product looks less styled than brought along.

Dooney & Bourke began in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1975. Peter Dooney and Frederic Bourke first made belts, suspenders and small leather goods. The decisive product arrived in 1983 with All-Weather Leather: pebbled cowhide designed to shed water. The line became known for smooth contrast trim and an oval duck patch. The duck made the material claim literal. Rain should roll off the bag as it does from the bird.

The bag here belongs to that language, although I can't verify its exact model. Its curved flap and long strap suggest a saddle bag; the dark edging gives the softly grained body enough structure. It isn't delicate, and the advert makes no attempt to pretend otherwise. The bag is pressed against trousers, grass and an old wooden bench. Dooney & Bourke sells it as something already absorbed into a life, not an object waiting to be admired.

The Vogue archive lists the brand on pages 77 to 80 of the December issue. The advert avoids the city and the conspicuous polish usually attached to an expensive handbag. Instead it offers the wholesome, slightly preppy outdoors: muted knitwear, pearl studs and a neat hair clip. Everything suggests order rather than display.

Dooney still makes an All-Weather saddle bag with pebbled leather, contrast trim and the duck insignia. The newer version is more polished, but the 1995 advert understands the older product better. A durable bag should look convincing outdoors.

In this 1992 advertisement, Yasmeen Ghauri reclines in a cream belted suit while the Erreuno logo runs across the bottom like bent chrome tubing. The clothes are expensive but not spectacular: soft shoulders, a broad printed collar, enough fabric to make ease look deliberate. It is a good image for a house that prospered without developing an equally durable public identity.

Ghauri gives the picture more voltage than the garment asks for. By 1992 a recognisable model could lend an unfamiliar label some of her own visibility. The setting offers sun, painted garden furniture and the suggestion of somewhere expensive. No Italian monument, no obvious narrative. Erreuno lets the atmosphere and the clothes remain pleasantly unresolved.

Ermanno and Graziella Ronchi founded Erreuno in Milan around 1970 or 1971. The sources disagree by a year. The name joined the Italian pronunciation of R, erre, to uno: Ronchi's first venture. According to the fashion reference MAM-e, the business began in a basement, with Ermanno selling and Graziella designing, then grew by visiting provincial boutiques rather than waiting for Milan to notice.

The decisive move was to treat the label as a meeting point between factory, fabric, and outside designer. Gianmarco Venturi worked on its ready-to-wear in the 1970s. Giorgio Armani designed for Erreuno from 1980 to 1988, when his own name was already becoming shorthand for relaxed authority. A contemporary Washington Post report described buyers rising to applaud Erreuno's 1982 collection of blousons and unexpected gold, then identified Armani as its power broker. Erreuno gave that language another production platform: tailoring softened until a woman could move inside it.

Graziella's role mattered because she translated runway ideas back into usable clothes. That practicality remained after Armani left. The house developed its own fabrics, mixed checks and stripes, and stayed between his restraint and the more theatrical Milan of Versace. Ghauri's suit belongs to that middle ground. The robe-like closure is relaxed, but the patterned collar keeps it from disappearing into beige. It resembles the other Armani that fashion memory often edits out: fluid rather than corporate.

Michael Kors designed Erreuno J, introduced to the American market in 1990, another revealing hire. The house expanded into menswear, jeans, accessories, golf and fragrance, exporting almost half its production at one point. Yet breadth did not produce a symbol comparable to an Armani jacket or a Versace Medusa. A Politecnico di Milano study describes Erreuno as internationally recognised in the 1980s and 1990s, then inactive for more than twelve years before an archive-led relaunch.

Erreuno belongs to the industrial history of Made in Italy more than its hall of fame. Designers supplied recognisable handwriting; manufacturers, textile researchers and sales networks turned it into a business. The Ronchis built a house sturdy enough to carry Armani, Venturi and Kors, yet flexible enough that each could leave traces. The label faded. The system it represented became the Italian fashion industry.