Gianfranco Ferré had been at Dior for seven years when he showed his fifteenth haute couture collection in July 1996. He did not know it was the last one. The Galliano announcement was still three months away, the British press hadn't started speculating, and the fittings inside 30 Avenue Montaigne went on with the usual quiet tension of a house preparing its July couture week. What he produced was the largest, slowest, most ornamental collection of his tenure, and the most personal. He called it Passion Indienne.

Ferré had spent the early 1970s travelling repeatedly to India, designing accessories before he made any clothes at all. The trips became the formative period of his visual education. Twenty-five years later, sitting in the most French of all French houses, he went back to that source. The collection was an act of return rather than appropriation. He named the looks after places he had actually been: Bangalore, Shalimar, Delly, Lalita. The list reads like an atlas of a younger man's notebook.

The centrepiece was the Koh-I-Noor, a peach pleated-tulle dress with lace embroidered in arabesques and strewn with strass, crystal sequins and gold beads. It is the piece every retrospective returns to, partly because Dior Héritage still photographs it beautifully and partly because it carries the conceit of the whole collection in one garment: French couture geometry holding together a surface that wants to behave like a Mughal miniature. The Bangalore suit did the same trick in a different register, a silk jacquard cut to the strict architecture of a couture two- piece, then accessorised at the runway with a draped veil that read as a sari. Elixir was fuchsia pleated tulle with a gold- embroidered bustier. Delly was black silk crêpe and organza embroidered with gold Mughal flowers. Even the wool tailoring got the treatment: the Lalita suit was slate-grey wool, but the cuffs were trimmed in ostrich feather.

What's striking, twenty-nine years later, is how unfashionable the collection was at the time. By July 1996 the prevailing wind in Paris and Milan was already toward the ugly chic vocabulary Miuccia had introduced nine months earlier, toward Helmut Lang's anti-shoulder, toward minimal palettes and deliberate awkwardness. Ferré went the other way. He went toward volume, ornament, gold thread, embroidered flowers, silk worked to within an inch of its life. There was an argument inside the collection: that haute couture had to keep being maximal because nothing else in the system could afford to be.

The argument lost in a way that was almost immediate. The Galliano appointment was announced in October. By the time Galliano showed his first Dior couture in January 1997, the house had committed to exactly the kind of theatrical pop spectacle Ferré had spent seven years working in the opposite direction from. Passion Indienne became, retrospectively, the closing statement of an entire register of nineties couture: ornament without irony, reference without pastiche, a designer drawing on his own biography rather than the season's mood.

Ferré went back to Milan and kept making the white shirts he had always made, until he died in 2007. The Koh-I-Noor is still in the Dior Héritage collection in Paris. The collection that closed his seven years at Avenue Montaigne is, on the evidence, also the most loved of the fifteen. Time has been kinder to it than the room it was first shown in.

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