A grey greatcoat lined in scarlet, chinchilla running down every edge, black gloves, and Yasmeen Ghauri carrying the whole weight of it down a Milan runway for autumn/winter 1992. She has a fistful of hem in one hand and the coat swings open on that red lining at every step. Behind her the runway is stacked with more red, other models waiting in scarlet wool with the same grey fur at their cuffs.

Underneath is the piece the coat exists to frame, a gold-on-red brocade jacket with a mandarin collar and knotted frog fastenings, urns and scrolls worked across it in metallic thread. Ferretti pairs it with plain grey worsted trousers and red leather cuffs turned back over the coat sleeves, which is a strange and very good decision. The brocade is doing chinoiserie at full volume; the trousers are doing nothing at all. Put a matching skirt under that jacket and the look tips into costume. The dull grey flannel is what keeps it wearable.

The quietest thing in the show is a pale ice-blue suede column, sleeveless, mandarin-collared again, slit to mid-thigh, hung with dozens of strands of iridescent crystal that fall from one shoulder and swag across the body like a bandolier. The same beading is wrapped in wide cuffs at both wrists. Suede is heavy and matte and slightly chalky, and the beads are pure refracted light.

Then the collection changes its mind completely. Ghauri comes out in a fringed white leather coat over white trousers, a gold sequinned belt and cuff, white gloves, and a printed silk shirt covered in stars and stripes, eagles, gilt cartouches, the words E PLURIBUS UNUM, and the year 1992 printed on the turned-back cuff. That year was the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus sailing, and Columbus was Genoese, which makes an Italian house putting American state iconography on silk for that season legible as a nod to the anniversary. It's a reading, not a source. The coat at full length throws a foot of fringe off the shoulder line and is the best-made thing in the five pictures.

Ghauri was 21 and having the year of her career, the face of Valentino couture and of Versace, whose bondage show she had walked in Milan that February. The New York Times described her walk as a "ball-bearing swivel of her hips." You can see it in a still. She's mid-stride in every one of these frames, hem swinging, and the clothes are being moved rather than displayed.

I went looking for a review of this collection and found essentially nothing. The Fashion Model Directory's page for the show answers with a 403. Bloomsbury Fashion Central holds a catalogue entry for it behind a subscription wall. Vogue Runway does reach back to 1992, but its entire fall season that year comes to three houses, Alaïa, Comme des Garçons and Versace, and Ferretti isn't one of them. What's left in public is a scatter of Pinterest reposts and photographs like these, while the Ferretti show from February this year is documented frame by frame in perpetuity. Erreuno went the same way, a label that produced clothes for years and left me almost nothing to follow.

The gap does Ferretti no favours. WWD, reviewing her in 2018, referred to the ethereal dresses she's known for, and almost none of that is in these frames. Chinchilla, silk brocade, fringed leather, crystal by the yard: whoever was cutting this winter had not yet become the house her name now signifies.

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