Two greens, and they are not meant to match. The storm coat is coated to a wet shine, cut wide enough through the sleeve to swallow whatever sits underneath, and fastened with gold snaps instead of buttons so the front stays flat. The double-breasted jacket beneath it lands in the same pistachio register but matte, tailored close, four gold domed buttons running down it. Wearing the two together is the proposition: one surface throws the studio lights back and the other absorbs them.

Under the greens Gail Elliott has powder blue on powder blue, a silk shirt with a white contrast collar and flapped patch pockets buttoned to the throat, over trousers in the same blue, dry and heavy. No print anywhere on the body. The pattern is quarantined into two scarves, one worn as a headband, one knotted at the neck, both in the same blue-green-orange floral. Six months later the winter book would put her in tartan and carriage-print silk from the collar down.

Then the gold: a plaque buckle with two hearts flanking a capital E, baroque earrings set with blue stones. Escada spent the eighties making gold the argument rather than the trim, and on this page that is where the volume has gone. The fabric behaves. The hardware does not.

In April 1993 the chief designer Michael Stolzenburg told the Los Angeles Times that "Escada will do no grunge", and sold retailers an easier, more youthful autumn, on the grounds that younger customers no longer felt it was the right time to be showy. Some of that easing had already happened in the cloth before he described it, and the autumn book then arrived in tartan and gold medallions anyway. Nobody was going to mistake this coat for a flannel shirt. But the restraint the eighties never managed is in the plain blue trousers, not in anything the house said about them.

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