Red coat over red jacket over red skirt, red gloves against black tights, and a brass rail she's leaning back on with both arms spread wide, as if she's holding the empty plaza still. The only words anywhere in the picture sit in the bottom corner: the Woolmark, and beneath it, Pure new wool. Everything else is colour doing the talking. Looked at cold it's an odd bit of staging, a woman braced against a handrail in a concrete forecourt, smiling at nobody, dressed for a season the light doesn't quite support.

Then the cab. There's a yellow taxi with checkerboard trim parked on what looks like a pier, rounded 1930s fenders in deep red, whitewall tyres, a TAXI dome on the roof, and a woman in a black knit coat and yellow turtleneck resting one gloved hand on the wing like she's just bought it. No taxi in New York looked remotely like that in 1992. The fleet was Caprices and boxy Ford sedans, square and dented and the colour of weak mustard. This car is a costume. Somebody built it, or found it and painted it, so the photograph could say New York faster than a street sign ever would.

The third frame lines three of them up against the water: black, yellow, red, each one a single column of colour from throat to shoe, hands on hips, the skyline behind them dissolved into pale blue mush. I spent longer on that mush than I meant to. Off to the right there's a tower with a steep pyramid crown and I can't turn that shape into anything except 40 Wall Street, with the older Financial District piling up to the left of it. Which puts the camera on the Brooklyn side looking west, on a cold bright morning, the two towers standing just off the right edge of the picture. I'm confident about the building and a good deal less confident about the pier.

Then the front plate on the cab, which reads RJ, Rio de Janeiro. I noticed it late and it irritated me for a good hour, because a number plate is usually the most honest object in a photograph, the sort of small hard evidence I've used to date a picture before. If that one is genuine, the paragraph above is in serious trouble. I've come down on the side of the skyline, on the grounds that a pyramid-crowned Art Deco tower is difficult to fake and a plate screwed to a costume car is not, but I can't get both facts to sit still at once. Either way the cab is a fabrication, down to a licence from the wrong hemisphere.

None of which touches the clothes, and the clothes are the part that hasn't moved an inch. Black and white harlequin diamonds running down one sleeve, red and gold scrollwork down the other, a four-strand gold choker sitting high on the throat, the whole thing knitted rather than printed. That's the part people forget about Escada: the pattern is structural, worked into the cloth on the machine, which is where the density in their late-eighties knitwear comes from. Shoulders still huge, skirts still short, but the colour blocking has been disciplined into flat graphic slabs. It's 1988's appetite wearing 1992's haircut.

Margaretha Ley died in 1992. Whether she saw these frames, approved them, sat in a room in Munich and said yes to the taxi, I have no way of knowing, and the catalogue went out regardless. The women in it are uncredited, which was house practice: Escada gave the shops a byline and gave the models nothing.

So the pictures have quietly changed jobs. The towers went, Ley was gone inside the year, the cab was scrapped or repainted into something else, and the three women at the rail are somewhere in their sixties, still unnamed.† The door on that morning is shut. What got out was the light, which came off a red wool coat, went into a lens, and also went straight past it and kept going, and is thirty-four years out from here tonight, well beyond Vega, carrying an arrangement of yellow gloves and cold water that nobody is going to assemble again.

Amendment, 26 July 2026. They have names after all: the three at the water are Gail Elliott, Yasmin Le Bon and Niki Taylor. That also undoes the arithmetic in the sentence above, because Taylor was born in 1975, which made her a teenager when this was shot and makes her fifty-one now rather than sixty. ↩

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