Italian Style is that rare show in Portland, like China Design Now in 2009, that immerses you in a place you might never visit. The subject is high fashion, but the subtext is how Italy reinvented itself after World War II.

Don’t know your Puccis from your Pradas? Are Dolce & Gabbana a couple? Why are the discount stores stuffed with Tommy Hilfiger but not Armani?

The exhibit, Italian Style, comes from the renowned costume department of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Three decades ago, shows about fashion and design made that fusty museum interesting again. The V&A’s pop culture shows, such as one on David Bowie, are frequently blockbusters.

Fashion is a major export for Italy. The exhibit begins, as a lot of postwar Italian narrative does, by dropping Fascism like a hot potato and getting into the glamour of the upper classes.

Downstairs at the entrance to the Portland Art Museum there is a long T-shaped runway filled with fantastic modern dresses and suits made by the best Italian fashion houses, including Pucci, Valentino, Gucci, Missoni, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Prada and Versace.

In other museums, these pieces are placed at the end of the show: it’s the “state of the art” section. Here you marvel at the sculptural forms, the fabrics, the craftsmanship and the unending inventiveness of things to cover the human body, before heading upstairs for the main narrative.

There we first see a series of evening gowns in glass cases — bold sculptures made for size-two aristocrats. There is a gold gown with a typical 1950s bell skirt. The dress has hundreds of silk flaps cut on the round, so they look like feathers. It’s made by a noblewoman called Simonetta who, falling on hard times, went into dress designing and tapped her social network for customers.

Many of the dresses in the first section wouldn’t be out of place on a 2015 red carpet. They were shown at the Sala Bianca (white room) in Florence in the 1950s. Fashion journalists were invited to stop off after the Paris shows, before returning to America.

The looks and the quality tailoring appealed to the American market, where the postwar economic boom left plenty of women hungry for glamour and with the money to pay for it.

In another glass case is a blue silk evening bag and a dark wool jacket both by Maria Grimaldi. The jacket is laid out not to show a label — there is none — but the careful tailoring of its red, silk lining. Again the message is Italian craftsmanship was exceptional.

The narrative lurches forward in the next room with the Hollywood on the Tiber section, which shows how Hollywood was seduced by Roman style. When Audrey Hepburn was shooting films such as “Roman Holiday” she was a clothes horse for Italian designers. Her personal life, like that of Elizabeth Taylor, was fodder for the tabloids.

You can look at the diamond brooch that Eddie Fisher bought for Taylor at Bulgari just before she dumped him for Richard Burton. (Fisher sent her the bill, and she paid.)

Movies such as “La Dolce Vita” (The Sweet Life, 1960) by Federico Fellini may have satirized the excesses of the rich and the paparazzi who followed them, but the takeaway was a superficial interest in Italian style and glamor.

Seeing the paisley coat made for opera singer Maria Callas, or the multicolored bikinis and loungewear of Emilio Pucci, we can see how the 1960s hit with the impact of Technicolor, an impact that is still being felt. The fabrics may be fading, but the designs could be right out of an iPad ad.

Pucci was a Fascist sympathizer and helped pay for his tuition at Reed College in the late 1930s by designing outfits for the Reed ski team. His bold colors and shapes got him noticed on the slopes back in Italy. Marilyn Monroe was buried in a Pucci dress.

The rise of Italian ready-to-wear fashion (made in factories by machines rather than pure craftspeople) is the main success story here. But there is a side room with some men’s suits — thick, wool suits that are surely due for a comeback. Or if a 1980s revival is due, perhaps the soft, unstructured look of Armani that landed him on the cover of Time magazine will do it.

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The show comes alive downstairs with the modest eccentricity of Italian fashion; see the multicolored, shaved mink ensemble (it looks like suede), or a Versace leather jacket and trousers covered in fringe. A fuzzy video shot in a Fiorucci store at an after-hours party in 1977 shows a rocker with a beer, a shirtless dude dancing, and lots of New York women with a slight Cindy Lauper look to them. It shows how cool a clothing brand could be. Brands were soon to transcend their designers and owners on the way to becoming the protected species they are today.

A new, high-definition video shows some key figures in Italian fashion — including the scary Italian Vogue editor, Franca Sozzani, who looks like she’s from a Laika animation — talking about challenges to Italy’s industry status. Not only are the Milan runway shows being eclipsed by London, but Chinese investors are buying up Italian marques and know-how so they can stamp Made In Italy on their products. The town of Prato, the traditional center of the wool trade, has the second-largest Chinese community in Italy.

The show includes more than 100 ensembles and accessories, and near the end it includes some Portland designers’ work, including a plastic wedding dress by Elizabeth Dye, just before you are spit into the gift shop for the inevitable retail therapy.

With minimal signage the show forces you to consider clothing as sculpture.