There is a dress in Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means (1963) that my memory has never quite shrugged off. It’s a dress by the Paris-based designer, Elsa Schiaparelli—renowned in the 1930s and 40s for her surrealist designs. Spark’s novel is set in the austerity of postwar London. Yet she gives us a Schiaparelli dress that is almost fantastical, passing from girl to girl in a boarding house in Kensington as they borrow it for nights out. Only the slender girls, mind. The “slender means” of the title evoke the poverty of wartime rations; the wearing of the dress requires a slender form.

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In the same punning spirit, my memories of this dress were sparked by the spring Schiaparelli exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, also in Kensington.…