ROME — Two crocheted tentacles, each 14 metres long, hang over the entrance of the Valentino Foundation’s new show, the centrepiece of an exhibition turning Italian fashion’s most legendary house into a stage for contemporary art. We spoke to curator Pamela Golbin inside the galleries, where Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos and Valentino archive pieces share the floor in a dialogue years in the making. She told us the monumental Valkyrie sculpture in the first room was built in collaboration with 10 Roman institutions, including prisons, hospitals and children’s wards, and crocheted by hand by more than 200 people. Each subsequent room explores a different identity of the contemporary woman, from heroine and seductress to the Cinderella myth and the femme fatale, ending in a Garden of Eden. The show, Golbin said, is as much about the foundation’s social mission as it is about beauty.