There Were Meant to Be 28,800 Tulips - One for Every Day of the Brand, but Two Children Took One Each at the Rehearsal

Twenty-eight thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight yellow tulips lined the runway. There were meant to be exactly 28,800 - one for each day of the brand's existence - but the two children of creative director Wes Gordon took one each at the rehearsal. That is the only detail of this show that was not planned.

Carolina Herrera, aged 87, sat in the audience at the David H. Koch Theater in New York, transformed into a replica of Park Avenue. The brand she founded in 1981 is marking 45 years, and the spring-summer 2027 show was assembled almost entirely from references to those beginnings.

There was a dress carrying the silkscreen Andy Warhol made from a Polaroid photograph of her. There was organza embroidered with the cover of a magazine from the week she held her first show in 1981. There were jackets with brooches shaped like zebras and golden frogs - a nod to her favourite restaurant.

This is the key thing about Herrera and few people say it out loud: she sold one and the same white shirt for forty-five years. Polka dots, a white shirt with narrow trousers, sheer evening skirts, dramatic organza ruffles. The palette - white, black and New York taxi yellow, softened with pistachio green, dusty pinks, salmon and baby blue.

In an industry that abandons itself every six months, someone doing the same thing for four and a half decades looks like an anomaly. In fact it is the opposite - it is the only strategy with a proven result. Trends are borrowed; recognisability is built.

The guests included Herrera's granddaughters, Olympia Baez and Carolina Lansing, Tory Burch, Pamela Anderson, Olympia of Greece and Gabriela Hearst. Granddaughters in the audience at a 45th anniversary are not merely a family scene - they are a statement about who the name belongs to next.