Yasmeen Ghauri folds into an orange chair the same rust as her dress, one gold hoop catching the light, and lets a single black bag hang over one bare shoulder. Everything in the frame is heat: the chair, the dress, the warm brown ground behind her. The bag is the one cool thing, black leather with a gold plate reading PORTFOLIO PERRY ELLIS, and the whole picture is built to make you look at it.

This is a hero-product shot, the opposite of selling a wardrobe. There's one bag, lit like a jewel, and a face turned back over the shoulder to point at it. Ferragamo would hand Claudia Schiffer an armful and sell the whole line at once; Portfolio gives you a single object and trusts the restraint to read as taste. I find that the harder sell.

The name carries more than it lets on. Portfolio was the first line Perry Ellis ever put his own instincts into, a women's sportswear collection for the Vera Companies, first shown in 1976, two years before he opened his own house. He later brought it back as the cheaper line, machine knits instead of hand, wool instead of cashmere, priced well below the main collection. So the label on this bag is doing something quietly strange by 1991: it's Ellis's first word, his entry-level name, sold now as a leather good, and Ellis himself had been dead five years, the company running in trust while Marc Jacobs designed the clothes.

Ghauri was the right face for that year. She was fronting Perry Ellis in 1991, one of the striking, faintly aloof models the early nineties trusted to carry a brand on a look alone. She doesn't smile at the bag. She just makes sure you saw where it was.

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