This picture of Gail Elliott on a white parapet, turning back to the camera in a long fringed jacket, comes from the same sitting as her cover for the April 1989 issue of British Marie Claire, though it isn’t the frame they used. This one has the whole day in it: matching trousers, a balustrade, a hand braced on the ledge, hair slicked back as if she’s just come out of the sea, mountains going blue in the distance and a sky that hasn’t decided whether to clear. The copy here has been through Topaz’s Wonder 4, enlarged fourfold from a scan, so the individual threads of the fringe are partly the software’s guess. The shape is in the original, though, pale tufts on the shoulder and a ragged line running down towards the waist.

The cover crops all of that away. It’s head and shoulders, the collar pushed up against her jaw and the column and hills blurred to nothing, and she looks almost straight out, unsmiling, lips slightly parted. The two frames share the thing that makes them work, which is that she isn’t selling anything with her face. Here she glances back over her shoulder as if someone has called her name and she hasn’t decided whether to answer. That reserve is why neither picture looks dated to me in the way a big toothy grin from the same year would. The clothes and the lipstick, a proper 1989 red, give the date away. Her face doesn’t.

The type on the cover tells you more about the magazine than the photograph does. Above the masthead it says “April £1.20 British Edition”, and down the left side, in blue and red capitals, run “Women with an insatiable desire for sex”, “The child slave trade” and “‘We saw the Virgin Mary’”, then lower down “How to be famous for a day”. Fashion is squeezed in at the very bottom: “Fashion: fresh affordable irresistible”.

That mix was the point. Marie Claire’s own history describes the French original as offering “serious and provocative journalism for women, by women, on top of covering all the latest in fashion and beauty.” The British edition had only been running since September 1988, so this was its eighth issue, and the cover keeps that promise fairly literally. Beyond the cover I haven’t found much of what was inside.

Elliott was 22 that spring. She was born in Balham, went to Tokyo at 17 on a two-month contract that turned into two years, and moved to New York at 19 with a full portfolio, as she told Ella Baché years later. In 1989 she was also wearing Escada, whose knitwear of that moment covered every surface in appliqué and colour blocks. So in the same year the same face was selling both directions at once, the heavy, decorated end of the eighties and this pared-back white.

The shops were describing the move away from decoration that spring. A UPI report from 3 April 1989, written at a Saks seminar in Virginia, lists it plainly: “Shoulders are narrower, pants are wider,” suits are softer and sheer fabrics are everywhere. Kirk Reeves, Saks’s couture director, put it bluntly: “Fashion has cleaned up to a large degree.” In Milan, the Ferré archive’s notes on his spring collection list “absolute white,” and in Paris Martin Margiela had just shown his first collection, for spring and summer 1989, the beginning of the deconstruction he’d become known for, which went a long way further than anyone at Saks was talking about.

I don’t know who made Elliott’s jacket, and the scan doesn’t say. It still has a little shoulder to it, and the fringe is pure late-eighties fun, but the padding has mostly gone and the colour has gone entirely. It’s one shade and a good face doing the work that gold buttons and bows were doing a couple of years earlier.

There’s a ring on the hand pressed against the ledge, a plain band, and as far as I can see it’s the only jewellery in the picture. I didn’t notice it until the third or fourth look.

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