The page comes from a Japanese collections magazine and gives the designer three lines: MILAN in spaced capitals, KATHARINE HAMNETT under it in a fat serif, then the name once more in katakana. The city is the surprising one. Hamnett belongs, in most people's memory, to London, and specifically to March 1984, when she shook Margaret Thatcher's hand at a Downing Street reception celebrating the launch of the first London Fashion Week, wearing a t-shirt that read 58% DON'T WANT PERSHING in her own block capitals.

The clothes eleven years later go somewhere the slogan tees don't prepare you for. Ingrid Seynhaeve walks it in pale blue fur to the ankle, an iridescent white waistcoat buttoned over a satin bodice, hot pink vinyl trousers piped in white. Glossy, commercial, faintly Alpine, and about as far from cotton jersey and a political statistic as a wardrobe can travel.

She gave the reason for the address herself, in Milan, in July 1993, while showing menswear: Paris had become overcrowded with shows, and she was thinking of bringing the women's presentations over as well. Paris, note, not London. Her own company timeline puts the first Milan womenswear catwalk at spring/summer 1994, making the collection on this page her fourth Italian season, and landing her in the same city and season Tom Ford used to rescue Gucci.

It was also her last. That same timeline records her making front page news in 1995 heralding a return to London, where she showed spring/summer 1996. The whole Milan run came to four seasons, entered on a scheduling complaint and left in a blaze of coverage. Leaving Paris was housekeeping; going home was an announcement.

Whether that coat is fake fur or dyed shearling I can't tell from a scan. Hamnett blew the whistle on textile industry malpractice in 1989, but what she lobbied on was cotton, pesticides and the people growing it, so fur was never the fight she picked. The question is mine, imported, and the page doesn't answer it either way.

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