Page 72 of the October 1988 American Vogue is a study in doing nothing well. Yasmin Le Bon sits folded into a white garden chair in an October garden, chin propped on one hand, eyes on something outside the frame. Beige fedora, grey cardigan over a white collar, glen check trousers, a pair of dark gloves gone limp across her lap. Fallen leaves everywhere. The picture wants you to read it as England: a walled garden, a bench going cold, the particular hush of a country afternoon in autumn. It's very good at it.

Nothing about the company was English. Ports International began in Toronto in 1961 as Newport Canada, an import business bringing clothing over from Japan, run by Luke Tanabe, a Vancouver-born designer whose parents had emigrated from Japan. He renamed it in 1966 and spent two decades building it into a quietly international label: a Manhattan flagship by 1970, boutiques in Boston and Palo Alto, a store on Bond Street. What Ports sold was never Englishness exactly, more the idea of unhurried, well-bred ease, assembled by a Japanese-Canadian silk importer and sold, in this instance, to American women through the pages of a New York magazine.

The model completes the trick. Yasmin Le Bon was born Yasmin Parvaneh in Oxford, the daughter of an Iranian father, discovered at seventeen while working in a local boutique. She first appeared in American Vogue in May 1985, shot by Arthur Elgort in the Bahamas, and by 1988 she was one of the highest-earning models in the world, her surname borrowed from the Duran Duran frontman she'd married at the end of 1985. So the most convincingly English page in the issue is an Iranian-English pop wife, styled by a Japanese-Canadian company from Toronto, performing a country-house calm that none of the parties involved actually came from. Authenticity had nothing to do with it. Assembly was the product.

All that stillness was coming out of a company that had none left. Tanabe was in his late sixties and a year from selling up; he'd just hired two young Canadian twins, Dean and Dan Caten, as co-designers, and if the name registers now it's because they later moved to Milan and became DSquared2, roughly as far from garden hats as fashion gets. In 1989 the company went to the Chan brothers of Etac Sales, who eventually walked Ports out of Canada entirely and into China, where its descendant, Ports 1961, runs several hundred stores. So this is the label's last Tanabe autumn, photographed as if nothing would ever change, commissioned by a company where everything was about to.

The magazine around it wasn't calm either. Anna Wintour had arrived as editor that summer, and the next issue would carry her first cover, Michaela Bercu grinning in stonewashed Guess jeans and a jewelled Christian Lacroix jacket, the pairing usually credited with ending the studio-formal Vogue cover at a stroke. Read against what was coming, the Ports page holds up oddly well. The tailoring is borrowed from the boys, the hat is doing the work a chignon used to, and the ease it performs sits closer to the incoming taste than to the lacquered pages around it.

At the foot of the page runs the roll call: New York City, Boston, Washington DC, Chicago, Louisville, Dallas, Scottsdale, San Francisco, Newport Beach, South Coast, Palo Alto, La Jolla. Twelve cities in small caps, Louisville sitting comfortably beside La Jolla. The city list was the standard signature of the department-store age, the same convention Episode would use in its own Vogue page two years later: the brand as a network of addresses, proof that the dream had physical coordinates you could drive to.

October 1988 was a crowded month for Yasmin. On the other side of the world, that month's Marie Claire Japan had her wandering Saint-Germain in an editorial called "I Love Paris", a Japanese photographer selling France to Tokyo in the same weeks a Japanese-Canadian label was using her to sell England to Americans. The gloves in her lap never once left the garden.

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