Estelle Lefébure laughs straight into the camera in Laurel's spring 1990 picture, one hand pushed into her hair and a painted bangle slipping down her forearm. The jacket is black cotton overprinted with lime, cobalt and tomato-red shapes, finished with gold buttons and a gilt bull's head pinned near the pocket. It is loud and cheerful, a little naive. Another page from that season calms down: she sits with one arm draped over a knee, gazing off to the side, in a cream sweater knitted with two spotted animals in ochre, sheer chiffon in the same colour below, and a wooden bangle stacked against a gold one. Three years earlier she had been on the cover of Grazia in Italy. Neither spring scan mentions Escada, and you would never guess from them that the clothes came out of the same Bavarian operation as one of the loudest luxury labels of the decade.

Margaretha Ley and her husband Wolfgang started a knitwear business in 1976, launched Escada in 1979, and added Laurel a year later as a secondary, mid-priced line. It sold. By the end of the eighties Laurel was outselling Escada by number of pieces, and when the Leys visited Neiman Marcus in Chicago in November 1989, the Tribune described Laurel and a second sister label, Crisca, as Escada's "sportier relatives", made at the same complex outside Munich as the main collection.

The autumn campaign is franker about the family tree. Glancing back over her shoulder, Lefébure wears a black jacket worked in gold scrollwork that could have come straight off an Escada rail, with star studs in her ears and a gold star stitched to the cuff. An oversized, lower-case "Laurèl" runs across the bottom, and beneath it, in small capitals, "A Division of Escada". Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus sit in the top corner. The copy reads "For Every Woman who has Personal Style down to an Art," and the tagline is "The Smart Decision."

A fashion label calling itself a smart decision is selling the parent company's name at a discount, and the page does exactly that, setting Escada's embroidery and Escada's stockists beside a word usually reserved for insurance. In 1991 the Los Angeles Times still listed Laurel and Crisca among Escada's "designer lines", alongside the new Apriori collection.

Within three years Laurel was a problem. Margaretha Ley died in 1992, the group started cutting losses, and Crisca closed with its spring 1993 collection. In a piece on Escada's American recovery plan, from around 1994, WWD called Laurel "a troubled division that was categorized above bridge and below designer": too dear for the bridge shopper, not quite the real thing. Five Laurel stores were shut. Jackets that had wholesaled at $220 to $325 were cut to roughly $155 to $220, and ten deliveries a season became five or six. The new customer was a career woman of about 40 to 55, and the competition was Ellen Tracy and Anne Klein II: sensible career separates, a long way from a bull's head pinned to a painted jacket.

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