Four women come at the camera in cream knitwear and white tights, three of them laughing and one smiling at the floor, and the only words anywhere are two names. SAKS FIFTH AVENUE sits small in the bottom corner, the store's credit line, while DANA BUCHMAN gets the big serif capitals under four grey squares, which looks backwards until you remember who was famous in October 1987. Buchman's first collection had only just reached the shops, and in August the Los Angeles Times had promised hers was "a name you'll hear more often come September," when the clothes arrived and a national advertising campaign rolled out with them. The label belonged to Liz Claiborne, and it was the company's first attempt to sell anything under a name other than its own, so the page works hard to make that name stick.

Buchman, then 35, had spent five years designing knitwear at Claiborne after stints at Christian Dior and Ellen Tracy, and it shows. The Times described sweaters, shirts, pants and skirts "in winter white", with "many long sweater sets over skirts or pants" at $96 to $296, and that's the picture almost exactly: a V-neck long enough to pass for a dress with a cardigan slung over its shoulders, a checkerboard cardigan knitted tone on tone over a white shirt, a cable turtleneck with the sleeves shoved up, all in creams I couldn't tell apart. Famke Janssen is on the left, then Suzanne Lanza, then Gail Elliott in the cable knit. Janssen had moved to America from the Netherlands three years before and signed with Elite; the acting came later.

For all that type, my eye goes first to the woman on the right, with her cropped hair, round glasses and one hand in her pocket. She's in the plainest piece in the picture and looks the least like a model, because she isn't one. It's Buchman herself, the "gamin looks" the Times had noted, standing right beside her own name in the biggest letters on the page.

The Times turned out to be right. By the mid-nineties Dana Buchman was one of the leading bridge labels, the price tier Escada's Laurel took care to place itself just above, and Buchman later said of the launch, "Liz gave me the keys and told me to go for it." In 2008 she gave up the upscale line to design for Kohl's, which bought the brand outright in 2011 and dropped it in 2020.

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