![]() Plain bone buttons worked best for most clothing items, although suspender buttons were sometimes stamped “elegant,” “mode de Paris,” or “for gentlemen,” as was common on both German and French trousers. Thread had to be the right thickness, and preferably sourced from the region where the agent was going. For tailored suits, an imitation tailor’s slip was placed inside the left jacket pocket. Labels were also transplanted from such items or copied in meticulous detail. When possible, SOE tailors used fabric smuggled out of Europe or repurposed from existing clothing taken from refugees or secondhand shops. “We did what was called a French seam.” (A French seam is sewn in two steps, so that the raw edges of the fabric are totally encased by the stitching.) Pulver and her colleagues took note of regional differences among the refugees’ clothing and created cardboard patterns to recreate the styles later.īritish-made zippers bore the brand name Lightning, which had to be carefully ground off the metal pulls with a dentist’s drill. “There certainly was an enormous difference between the side seams that were made on the Continent and those that were made in England,” Pulver recalled. Something as simple as the stitching on a seam advertised to the keen eye whether a garment was British or French or Dutch. “To start with,” Pulver told an interviewer for the BBC2 documentary program Secret Agent Selection, “we got old shirts from refugees and we took them apart, looked at the various collar shapes that were fashionable at the time, looked at the way they were manufactured, looked at the seams.” The SOE outsourced much of this production work to clothing companies owned by refugees, who were already well-versed in the sewing styles of their native lands.Ĭlaudia Pulver, a seamstress from Vienna, was working for a small garment-production company in central London called Loroco, Ltd., when she suddenly found herself a costume designer for Britain’s spies. But these sources were soon depleted, meaning the SOE had to begin manufacturing their own “authentic” European clothing and luggage to outfit their agents. At first, the SOE sourced outfits, shoes, and suitcases from secondhand shops or bought them from refugees who’d fled continental Europe for the British Isles. Spies needed to blend in, and to do that, they needed to wear what the locals were wearing. National and regional differences in fashion were more pronounced in the 1940s than they are today, as markets were less globalized and many people still made their own clothes or acquired them from local tailors and seamstresses. Being able to pass for a local depended on more than a flawless ability to speak the native language. The SOE’s spies all posed as inhabitants of the places they infiltrated-up to two-thirds of the agents actually were natives of the countries in which they worked. ![]() The organization’s greatest presence was in France, where the SOE dispatched 1,800 agents from May 1941 to September 1944. Thousands of spies would eventually penetrate every theater of World War II, from Poland to Ethiopia to Burma, with most serving in continental Europe. ![]() The SOE was created to train and manage covert agents who would infiltrate enemy territory for purposes of reconnaissance, subversion, and sabotage. After the fall of France and the evacuation of the British forces at Dunkirk, Britain needed a way to undermine the Axis powers from within. In July 1940, the British government established a secret intelligence agency called the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
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