A cedar canoe is not a Russian boat. It belongs on a lake in Maine or Ontario, and here it is carrying a full imperial Russian wardrobe across flat grey water. Nobody on the shoot corrected it, and that tells you what the Ralph Lauren Russia collection actually was: not a place, but a mood you could buy on Madison Avenue using whatever props were already to hand.

It showed for autumn 1993, two years after the Soviet Union came apart. Lauren went past all of that and landed somewhere around the 1920s: velvet, dark paisley, military-cut jackets, long skirts over tall boots. Kate Moss walked it in sheer silk velvet burnout balloon trousers and a Balkan coat with a high embroidered collar, which is theatre wardrobe rather than clothing, and theatre wardrobe is the register the whole collection worked in. Six months earlier the same house had put lavender blazers over cream turtlenecks and made restraint the entire argument. Autumn threw that out and went to the dressing-up box. The opening page sets the terms: RUSSIA in red capitals across the slate roof of a stone cottage, and beneath it a figure in a rust paisley coat crossing the lawn with an armful of kindling, walking past a wing-back chair someone has carried outdoors for the picture.

The advertising is better than the premise deserves. The styling in the red frogged coat never wavers: black astrakhan at the throat and cuffs, a curled lambswool hat pulled down past the ears, leather gloves closed around the oar, and a paisley shawl heaped in the stern as though thrown there in a hurry. The water is the colour of dishwater. She's rowing away from something the picture declines to name, which is about as much story as a clothing advert can carry without collapsing under it.

The rest of the campaign works the same seam and keeps the same discipline. Kim Nye sits on straw bales in a long herringbone coat and a soft tweed cap, a waistcoat and a white shirt buttoned to the throat under it, a wine velvet skirt spilling over her knees: a farm worker costumed by somebody who has never had to kneel in one. Zofia Borucka is shot in profile under a stiff-peaked cap, a red and gold paisley shawl over tweed with a printed silk square knotted at the neck, and the layering of three patterns that should fight and don't is the best piece of work in the whole campaign.

The model in the canoe is Agnieszka Kotlarska. She was still a student at Wrocław University of Science and Technology when she won Miss Polski at the Forest Opera in Sopot in July 1991; three months later she took Miss International in Tokyo, the first Polish woman to do it. Ford signed her in New York, and both Lauren and Calvin Klein used her. So the casting on this picture is a Polish woman, four years out from the end of Soviet control over her country, hired by an American house to sell a romance of the East. I doubt anyone in the room described it to themselves that way.

I came to the image for the tailoring, which really is superb, the frogging in particular. The canoe still nags at me. Somebody freighted a boat out to a location, filled it with paisley, and decided that the Russia in Russia was the optional part.

She left New York at the end of 1993, the same season these clothes were in the magazines, and went home to Wrocław. A stalker stabbed her to death outside her home in the Maślice district of the city on 27 August 1996. She was 24.

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