He almost quit before the show. Gucci was hemorrhaging money, the previous collection had landed without a review anyone could remember, and Tom Ford later said there was a moment when nobody was looking at anything he did. He could have sent anything down the runway. He sent the Fall/Winter 1995 ready-to-wear instead, in Milan, and the line between "almost quit" and "biggest designer of the decade" turned out to be that one show.

The clothes were not complicated. Jewel-tone satin shirts in emerald, sapphire, and aubergine, unbuttoned down past where a shirt is normally unbuttoned. Velvet hip-huggers cut so low they read as a sneer at the high-waisted minimalism the rest of Milan was selling that week. Horsebit loafers with a patent finish so glossy the photographers complained about the bounce. A handful of sharp wool suits. That was most of it. The collection was short, the silhouette was singular, and the styling was about seventy-five per cent of the message.

Ford killed the back-light. The Milan runway convention in 1995 was a long thrust stage with the front row facing each other across it, lit so that the buyers and editors could be seen as much as the clothes. Ford had the back lights dropped and ran the show with a hard spot down the centre, which meant the audience couldn't see each other and had no choice but to watch the clothes. Kate Moss walked. Shalom Harlow walked. Amber Valletta walked. The room got quieter than Milan rooms usually get.

The thing nobody could quite explain at the time was the register. Late minimalism was the dominant note that season, Helmut Lang's slip dresses, Prada's reduced palette, the careful restraint that the late nineties would later be remembered for. Ford's collection was the opposite of all of it, sexual in a way that was almost confrontational, glossy, expensive-looking, with a seventies disco floor underneath it. Amy Spindler wrote in the New York Times that he had brought cool back to luxury at a moment when street fashion had been the only thing that felt cool for years. That was the polite version. The less polite version was that the show looked like sex, and the buyers reacted to it accordingly.

Madonna wore the key look to the MTV Video Music Awards that September, a satin shirt unbuttoned to the navel and the velvet trousers, and a collection that had been hanging in Milanese showrooms became, in a single night, the thing half-famous people in Los Angeles wanted to be photographed in. By the following autumn, Calvin Klein, Versace, and Chanel had all shown their own hip-huggers. Donna Karan put a note on her skirt tags explaining where they were meant to sit on the body, because customers were complaining about waistbands that no longer hit at the waist.

The Chanel show that same Milan-and-Paris fashion month, at the Cirque d'Hiver in March 1995, was Karl Lagerfeld doing his own version of the supermodel spectacle, and the two collections shared a casting roster and a sensibility about what a runway could look like in the mid-nineties. Both shows leaned on the same handful of women. Both treated the audience as a secondary consideration. The difference was that Lagerfeld was already at the top of the mountain and Ford was hauling Gucci up it from base camp.

What Ford did at Gucci over the next nine years has been written about so many times the receipts blur, the 1,200 per cent sales growth, the Pinault acquisition, the eventual YSL appointment, the fall-out in 2004. The thing that gets written about less is how narrow the moment was. The same designer six months earlier had been weeks from firing. The same house a year before had been weeks from administration. The collection that turned everything was not a relaunch built with a year of preparation and a hundred million in marketing. It was one short show in Milan, with a spotlight off the audience and a row of jewel-toned satin moving through it.

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