Tasha De Vasconcelos models a shirt full of racehorses for Etro in the early 1990s, numbered jockeys in yellow, purple and red silks galloping across ivory. The styling is coordinated down to the wrists: a striped scarf that picks up the racing colours, gold buttons on a dark skirt, gold and enamel at the ears and cuffs. Shown this page without a name, I'd have said Escada. Her own biography, as it happens, lists Escada among the houses De Vasconcelos worked for and never mentions Etro at all.

Etro's history runs the other way round from the picture. Gimmo Etro started the company in Milan in 1968 to supply textiles to Italian ready-to-wear, and its fabrics grew out of the 300 or so antique shawls he collected with his wife Roberta, an antiques dealer. Clothes came late, and they came out of accessories. When Kean Etro moved into ready-to-wear in 1990, it grew from ties and haberdashery into a wardrobe, menswear first and womenswear a year later, and the house didn't stage a show in Milan until 1996. It was never only paisley, either. The family's taste in prints ran as far as silk scarves decorated with fusilli, so jockeys on silk sit comfortably within character.

Escada, founded in Munich in the late 1970s, had more than a decade of womenswear behind it by then, and what it sold was a system. "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," Margaretha Ley, its designer, told the Chicago Tribune in 1989, and the house dressed its pages accordingly, with gloves cut to the exact shade of the appliqué and a belt in the same acid yellow. Ley had even named the house after a racehorse that impressed her, which makes the jockeys here a happy accident.

This picture takes an Etro print and dresses it the Escada way, every accent answering the shirt, when a house that began with cloth might have let the print stand on its own. Over the following decades the motif that became Etro's signature was paisley, in its textiles since 1981, and not a jockey in yellow silks.

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