Sacha van Dorssen shot the cover. Gail Elliott — dark hair, brown eyes, that ethnically ambiguous beauty that let her slip between markets without friction — stared back from newsstands across Tokyo in October 1988. The Nikkei was climbing toward a peak it would never reach again. Emperor Hirohito had weeks left. And Marie Claire Japan, the very first international edition of the French title, was selling something more complicated than clothes.

Inside, Yasmin Le Bon wandered Paris in an editorial called "I Love Paris," photographed by Naoki. A Japanese photographer shooting a half-Iranian, half-English model on the streets of Saint-Germain for a Japanese audience. The Bubble Economy distilled into a single editorial concept — the possession of Paris itself. Peter Lindbergh contributed pages. Steve Hiett brought his oversaturated flash. Kirsten Owen, androgynous and sharp, offered the anti-glamour counterweight. Juliette Binoche got an interview off the back of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Romeo Gigli got a special feature, his soft Renaissance shoulders already dismantling the power suit from the inside.

This was the magazine for a specific woman. Not the Hanako girl buying Louis Vuitton at Isetan — her older sister, the one who wanted to know why she was buying it. Marie Claire monetised cultural capital in an era when financial capital was everywhere. Leos Carax and Terence Trent D'Arby in the same issue as Alaïa runway coverage. The magazine functioned as a passport, not a catalogue.

Fourteen months later, the stock market crashed and budgets like these evaporated. The location shoots dried up. I keep returning to this cover because it captures the apex so precisely — the last autumn when taste and money occupied the same room without anyone noticing the ceiling was about to fall.

The Cover That Outlived the Bubble