Cloak & Dagger Couture

Justine Picardie and Oriole Cullen are talking about the secret history of espionage in twentieth-century high fashion at the V&A South Kensington on Monday 9 November, from 19:00 to 20:45. The conversation is called Cloak & Dagger Couture, and it's held in the Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre.

The whole premise is that couture's golden age sat right across the two world wars, and the discreet, closed-door atmosphere of a fashion house made for a perfect cover for intelligence agents. The talk looks at the names that fit the bill: Edward Molyneux and Hardy Amies, and Christian and Catherine Dior. It also touches on the designers who were involved in covert activity themselves, even during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, with Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli among them. The late Queen Elizabeth II was once quoted as saying it was 'the perfect cover for a spy, to be a couturier', and that's the thread the evening pulls on.

Picardie is the author of Fashioning the Crown and biographies of Gabrielle Chanel and Catherine Dior, so she's spent a fair amount of time in these archives. She'll be in conversation with Oriole Cullen, the V&A's Senior Curator of Fashion, who knows the collection inside out. Together they'll be unpicking how the world of high fashion and the world of intelligence overlapped for so long without most people noticing.

The evening is part of Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, the first UK exhibition devoted to the designer, which is running in the Sainsbury Gallery until 15 November. If you're already planning to see the show, this is a good way to add a bit of context to it. Tickets are £15 to £20 and include a wine reception, with a livestream version available for £8. It runs from 19:00 to 20:45 on Monday 9 November at the V&A South Kensington.