A new exhibition charts how postwar Italy transformed the world's perceptions of it, using its greatest export: style
The word glamour originally meant magic or enchantment: to "cast a glamour" was to cast a spell to make something appear different from reality. And it is glamour in this sense what the author Virginia Postrel calls nonverbal rhetoric that is at the heart of the V&A's new exhibition, The Glamour of Italian Fashion 1945-2014.
Not that glamour in its modern, mainstream sense is in short supply: there is, naturally, a leopard-print gown by Roberto Cavalli, and a devastating cutaway cocktail dress by Donatella Versace.