it isn't impossible to imagine a museum in Italy mounting an exhibition devoted to British fashion.

After all, we did invent the suit and the diamond-patterned golf jumper, and I'd put money on us also having a hand in the onesie. But it would probably be quite a small museum, in a town only Ryanair or easyJet flies to. So probably not the Italian equivalent of London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Italian style and Italian fashion, on the other hand, are bywords for luxury, elegance and sartorial brio, and an exhibition devoted to them could well fill the V&A - as indeed it does from today when The Glamour Of Italian Fashion opens there for a three-month run.

The show covers the period from 1945 to the present day and has on display clothes by such familiar names as Versace, Prada and Missoni, as well as photographs and memorabilia from galleries and fashion archives and collections. It also features examples of work by lesser-known houses such as menswear label Rubinacci, which has been run out of an atelier in Via Chiaia in Naples since 1930 and is revered among tailoring cognoscenti (that's Italian too, by the way) for the rounded and hand-cut pockets on its suits. These are known as "pignata" pockets, a fact worth remembering if you are the type to take pub quizzes seriously.

Wonderful and dazzlingly glamorous all this may be, but it begs the question: are the Italians just inherently more stylish than the British? Or, more troubling, are the British just less stylish than everybody else except the Germans, the Russians and the Yanks? And if so, where does that leave the Scots? OK, that's three questions. But they are worth asking, particularly given last week's news that Missoni is pulling its name from the five-star boutique hotel it has run in partnership in Edinburgh since 2009. Good news for the guys on the door, who no longer have to brave the Scottish sleet with only a zigzag-patterned kilt for protection, but bad news for the capital's reputation as a fashion hub, I feel.

Writing in the section of the V&A catalogue devoted to Italian menswear, fashion historian Christopher Breward addresses this question. It's a cliche, he thinks, to put Italian men on a fashion pedestal but he also admits that, like all cliches, it hints at an underlying truth - and one of some considerable vintage. "The assertion that men of Italian ancestry have held a special and highly exportable claim on the art of fine dressing has been made by succeeding authors and social commentators since the publication of Baldassare Castiglione's influential Book Of The Courtier in 1528."

Blimey, 1528! Back then, we Jocks were still trogging around in boots, non zigzag-patterned kilts and T-shirts printed with whatever the Gaelic is for "Keep Calm And Ceilidh On". Good gear for a hooley or a Six Nations match but hardly stylish. Perhaps if we'd worn a cashmere sweater draped over our collective shoulder instead of a rustled sheep, history would have judged us the arbiters of style, not the Italians. But somehow I doubt it.