Two more frames have surfaced from the Alberta Ferretti autumn/winter 1992 show in Milan, alongside the five I wrote about in July. The question I keep being asked about this collection is whether it laid any groundwork, and the honest answer is narrower than either yes or no: nothing in these clothes anticipates the house Ferretti became. Whether it mattered at the time is a separate question, and one I'll come back to.

What the name means now is settled. Lisa Armstrong, writing in the Times, pinned the signature as a kind of Valentino look for a younger, slightly more bohemian woman, and the house itself sells that reading back in the language of chiffon, slip dresses and lace. Transparency and drift. It is the register that put Uma Thurman in crimson at the Oscars in 2000 and never really left the red carpet afterwards.

None of it is in these pictures. Helena Barquilla comes down the runway in a red wool jacket cut short and nipped, the shoulder built up, chinchilla at the collar and swallowing both cuffs so her hands emerge from grey fur in black leather gloves. Under it run brocade trousers in the same red, gold urns and cartouches printed the length of the leg, and the shine on them is doing all the work the jacket refuses to. That's the third chinoiserie piece I've now seen from this one show, after the mandarin-collared brocade jacket and the beaded suede column, so the theme was running properly through the collection rather than turning up once as a novelty. Heavy, opaque, structured, warm. The opposite of drift.

Whether Milan noticed, I can't tell you, and the reason is itself worth recording. Vogue Runway's archive does reach back to 1992, and its entire fall season that year comes to three houses; Ferretti is not among them. The Fashion Model Directory indexes the show and then answers 403 on every page that would name the cast, and Bloomsbury's catalogue entry sits behind a subscription wall. What survives in the open from these years is the business rather than the clothes: the Milan showroom at Palazzo Donizetti in 1994, New York two years after that, Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus by mid-decade. An expansion is easier to record than a collection.

So the clothes are free to be of their moment. The purple suit is period Milan almost to the point of parody: violet bouclé jacket and short skirt, a magenta leather shell zipped to the throat underneath, black suede gloves again, and a belt of gilt baroque medallions wide enough to be structural. Gold hardware over bright wool was general across the seasons either side, Krizia included. Set against the chiffon that came later, the violet and the gilt read less like an early draft than a different house altogether.

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