Count the yellow. On one Escada page from 1989 it lands four times on a single body: leather leaves with their veins pressed in, laid across the shoulder seam; a fat cable panel running down the sleeve in the same acid tone; a butter belt threaded through a cluster of gold rings; suede gloves cut to the exact shade of the leaves, Gail Elliott's hand pushed into a trouser pocket. The sweater underneath is grey flecked with gold, and the trousers are a pale check with a rust overcheck so fine you only catch it close up.

Read now, that much matching looks like a styling tic, one decade's idea of thorough. Escada's chief designer and co-owner, Margaretha Ley, described it as policy. "Certain colors repeat every season so that you can go back to your older wardrobe and mix it with new things for a new feeling," she told the Chicago Tribune in November 1989. The gloves match the leaves because the house expected you to own both in three years, and to buy something the following autumn that would still go with them. The gold runs the same system more quietly, flecked through the grey knit and turning up again as the rings on the belt, where nobody was meant to notice it working.

That expectation is the part that has gone. The ornament went too, and its absence is what you see first, but ornament was the visible half. Underneath sat a commercial promise: hold the palette steady, and the customer adds to a wardrobe instead of replacing one. The house kept at it, still selling two greens that deliberately didn't match as a pair in 1993. What survives of it now arrives one piece at a time. An eighties Margaretha Ley sweater with leaf appliqué goes for $224 on a resale site, out of the wardrobe of a former Escada vice-president who had $10,000 a year to spend filling it, whatever it was bought to be worn with scattered across other people's houses.

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