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.

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