Hollywood Costume, V&A, review - Telegraph Flickering celluloid runs overhead, or down pillars full of moving words and images, explaining the role of the costume designer. The trouble is that the purpose of the designer is one you can pretty well guess. "Costume is character," says Martin Scorsese. Yet when it stops worrying about justifying itself Hollywood Costume is a wonderfully evocative tribute to the movies. In the first spot-lit display you come across Charlie Chaplin's Tramp costume - deeply moving, since it marks the beginning of the creation of one of cinema's most durable images. "On the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat," he wrote in his 1964 biography - words displayed on a script in front of the suit. Nearby is The Dude's dressing gown from The Big Lebowski, not quite as significant perhaps, but just as exciting in all its brown bagginess to all fans of the Coen Brothers's cult movie. There too, thrillingly, is Vivien Leigh's famous green velvet crinoline from Gone With the Wind, supposedly made from the curtains but far too beautiful for that and cut by designer Walter Plunkett to display her wasp waist. If you loved the movie, you'll love the clothes. Indiana Jones gets an entire stand to himself, with Spielberg's initial stick figure drawing bearing a remarkable resemblance to the costume Deborah Nadoolman produced. On a screen behind the costume, its logic is explained: the Herbert Johnson hat had its brim trimmed so the camera could see Harrison Ford's eyes, its crown raised to flatter his face. Such revelations - including the fact that Judy Garland's ruby slippers were red to contrast with the yellow brick road and thus show off the Technicolor effects of The Wizard of Oz - punctuate the exhibition. I particularly liked the room where costume designers talk about their work on specific movies, as screens spread their designs across the work bench in front of you. Edith Head and Tippi Hedren bring the pale green suit she wore throughout The Birds to vivid life. It may have faded a little now because on the stand it looks blue, but on screen it was a sumptuous green - a colour Hitchcock chose and Head thought people wouldn't get tired of looking at. Nearby, Sandy Powell explains how she elongated Daniel Day-Lewis's natural height, so his dandy Butcher in Scorsese's The Gangs of New York would dominate every scene. Chameleons Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro also get a chance to explain their many costume changes, but nothing they say is as powerful as seeing how skinny De Niro was when he put on Travis Bickle's checked shirt and jeans and made Taxi Driver. That is the power of the show. The images these costumes conjure are overwhelmingly strong. They belong to our lives because they lived in the movies we have watched and that is what makes the sensation of seeing them - often slightly tattier and more crumpled than they looked on screen - infinitely touching. The final room recognises this, giving up its thematic preoccupations simply to set before us costume after costume: from Katharine Hepburn's jewelled evening gown from The Philadelphia Story to Rob Patz's battered tweeds from Twilight; from Keira Knightley's skinny green silk from Atonement to Dietrich's well-cut tails; from Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuit from Kill Bill to Barbra Streisand's silken Funny Girl ball gown. They stand in serried rows, an entire history of film. At the end, there is Judy Garland's tiny gingham frock that danced all the way from Kansas and Monroe's pleated white dress that once floated over a subway grating, with its waist so tightly cinched that you can hardly believe she could breathe let alone laugh. Iconic images both, here reduced to flimsy cloth and a memory of something marvellous.