Run your eye up the right edge of this Kenar page and a strip of small type is doing a lot of work: 755 Madison Avenue, a toll-free number, the date OCT '96, and then, spelled out in full with the http:// still attached, www.kenar.com. It's a supermodel portrait with a mail-order spine, three ways to reach the company stacked in a column beside Linda Evangelista's face.

The web address is the strange one. In October 1996 most fashion houses had no site worth printing, and few trusted a reader to type a URL at all. Kenar, a New Jersey sportswear label, put its domain on a Linda Evangelista ad and assumed you'd know what to do with it. The full http:// dates the page as precisely as a haircut. Nobody writes the protocol out now; in 1996 you had to.

Set that margin against the company's earlier pitch and you can watch the business turn over. Six years before, Kenar sold through other people's stores and printed the department-store names along the bottom of the page, Bloomingdale's and I. Magnin doing the selling. This page carries its own Madison Avenue address instead. The label had gone from renting space on good department-store floors to holding a door on the Upper East Side, with a domain to match.

The picture is quieter than the campaigns that made the name. No seven Sicilian women, no Times Square billboard, no concept to fight about. That same year, Kenar's advertising also gave us the image of Evangelista kissing a male double of herself, a shot the Guggenheim later singled out; this is its plain sister. Laspata DeCaro shot her close and against a dark ground, hair cropped and shoved out of shape, a striped turtleneck pulled to the chin. Everything that isn't her face falls away into grey. After a decade of building her into something close to a logo, Kenar spent part of its 1996 budget on plain beauty and a phone number.

The ad reads now like a company hedging its bets on how the next decade would reach a customer, two years before it ran out of decade. Above the phone number and the web address, Evangelista in that striped turtleneck looks straight out and sells nothing but her own face.

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