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. Article continues after advertisement 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. It is the first major exhibition of her work in London, subtitled “Fashion becomes Art,” and spans her output from the 1920s to her retirement in 1954.…