This week marked the opening of Fashion Panorama—The Italian New Wave at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles. Curated by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Vogue Italia, the traveling exhibition explores contemporary Italian fashion through the lens of 10 boundary pushing, emerging designers.

On the global stage Italy may very well be the country whose national identity is most closely associated with the fashion industry, but looking inward the exhibition posits that fashion in turn offers an important framework with which Italy and Italians can examine their own ever-evolving identity.