Christian Lacroix's first show under his own name opened the Paris fall-winter couture week on Sunday 26 July 1987. Fashion editors stood on chairs. They threw flowers at the runway. Some of them cried, openly, and the Guardian's reporter wrote it down without irony because that was what was actually happening in the room. Lacroix was thirty-six. He had signed in February with Bernard Arnault's Financière Agache for fifty million pounds, which made him the first new haute couture house in Paris since Courrèges in 1965.

The Patou years had given the press a shorthand for what to expect. He'd been the house designer at Patou without a contract since 1981, and the couture mob had already noticed the puffball, the bullfighter jackets, the dropped waists trimmed with Provençal embroidery, the late-eighteenth-century engravings cut down to a mini-skirt and re-coloured. Those Patou collections sold to a small list of private clients and to a slightly larger list of editors who couldn't quite work out where this register was supposed to sit. It wasn't revivalist exactly. It wasn't ironic. The historical references were treated as a working vocabulary rather than as costume.

What changed in July 1987 was the scale of the production. Arnault had given Lacroix an atelier at 73 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré fitted out by Élisabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, the neo-baroque furniture-makers, and the cocktail party the night before the show ran until four in the morning while the seamstresses were still working on the last looks behind a screen in the next room. The collection itself read like Lacroix had finally been allowed to publish everything Patou had made him cut. There were short broadtail cocktail suits with matching cocktail hats. Embroidered short jackets over moiré taffeta ball skirts the diameter of a small dining table. An above-the-knee silver fox coat with a shawl collar at the back that dipped almost to the hem. The puffball returned, larger and louder, in colours Patou would never have signed off.

The pouf became the easy press story because it was photographable and because it stood for the wider question the collection was raising. Late minimalism was already where the smart money said women's fashion was going. The Helmut Lang years were underway in Vienna; Donna Karan had spent two years stripping the American wardrobe back; Prada was a few seasons away from inventing ugly chic. Lacroix walked into that climate and presented an evening dress that required two assistants to manoeuvre through a doorway, and the audience treated it not as a provocation but as a deliverance. Some of that was Provence. He'd come from the south, his references were genuinely Boucher and Lautrec and the regional dress he'd absorbed as a child, and the clothes carried that conviction without apologising for being out of step.

The ending of the story is harder to enjoy. Black Monday hit nine days before his New York debut in October. The customers who had worn the big poufs and the big jewels at the July show, Lacroix said later, were in black-rimmed glasses and menswear by spring. The ready-to-wear that Arnault's contract had been built around never quite caught up to the couture. LVMH eventually sold the house to the Falic Group in 2005, the haute couture activity wound down later in the decade, and Lacroix today designs operas and ballets and the occasional hotel interior rather than dresses. The July 1987 show sits inside that arc like a held breath. For exactly one week the direction of Paris fashion looked like it might be about to reverse, and the editors who climbed on the chairs were not wrong about what they had just seen, only about how long it would last.

Sources: