Pablo Larraín’s Maria (2024)—a biopic about Maria Callas’s final days in Paris, starring Angelina Jolie—required costumes that conjured the expressive might of a woman who understood that appearance was also a form of performance. The Italian costume designer Massimo Cantini Parrini, who dressed Jolie for the film, is now presenting 18 of those costumes at the Benaki Museum, in Athens, organized in collaboration with students from Polimoda, the Florence fashion school where he studied and now teaches. It is a fitting city for the show, as Callas was the daughter of Greek immigrants in New York City. Born in 1923, she returned to Athens with her mother in 1937, hoping to study at the Athens Conservatoire; she didn’t gain entrance there until a second audition, in 1939. At age 15, Callas began her climb to opera’s Olympus, where she reigned as the most celebrated soprano of the 20th century. —Elena Clavarino