A short film called Counter-intelligence starts thus: “She was given the code name Mary and her task was to insert herself into the inner circle of Washington’s political set....” Shot with a rotating cast of glamorous secret agents dressed in parkas and polkas, the film is inspired from the book Betrayal: The Secret Lives of Apartheid Spies. But Counter-intelligence is not a screening at a documentary film festival. It was a digital showcase by South African designer Thebe Magugu at the Spring/Summer 2021 ready-to-wear segment of the Paris Fashion Week this year. In a series of close-circuit frames, models re-enacted the life stories of spies. Magugu conducted interviews with ex-spies who had either worked for the Apartheid government or had defected. The designer interwove fingerprints and the zig-zag lines of polygraph tests from these interviews into a collection devoid of cliches like trench coats and slogan T-shirts.
This story is from the November 08, 2020 edition of THE WEEK.
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This story is from the November 08, 2020 edition of THE WEEK.
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