Wednesday morning, July 1994. The Saint Laurent couture show opened to Berlioz and Wagner, arranged by Pierre Bergé, with a printed warning against plagiarism on the invitations. Six months earlier he had shown sixty-one numbers, one of the shortest collections of his career, assembled while recovering from double pneumonia, and taken his customary walk down the runway with Lucie de la Falaise. The July show was therefore being read for signs of life before a single exit had left the runway.

The waist was the news. After several seasons of women dressed out of the men's wardrobe, the torso came back as the thing every garment got built around, and the trade press ran the show under "Yves leads the Fit Parade". Jackets nipped in and stayed narrow at the shoulder. It opened on sass rather than severity, though: minidresses, belts slung wide across the hips, hats WWD could only call wacky, thigh boots pulled so high they read as tights.

The same discipline runs through the outerwear at a different scale. Silver fox over black suede, the fur running the full length of the front so the coat reads as two grey columns with a dark seam between them, and enough of it at the cuff to double the width of the sleeve. Gail Elliott, who walked this collection, wears it with her hands buried in the pockets and a beret cocked hard to one side, finished with a black fabric flower. Nothing about it is casual.

Then he gave the room a jolt he hadn't managed in years: three black tuxedo suits cut over the shortest skirts imaginable. Hemlines elsewhere went up and down with no governing rule, knee-skimming, short and belled, long and columnar, because he liked going back and forth to satisfy his clients. That is a different instinct from the Valentino anniversary collection three years earlier, where every proportion was argued from a single position. Saint Laurent was offering a wardrobe, not a thesis.

Evening headed East, or at least toward what Paris in 1994 meant by East. Coats in electric colours that WWD thought fit for a Mandarin empress, worn over straight satin and velvet gowns that do nothing underneath but hold still. He took the ovation at the end looking heavier and steadier than he had in some time.

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