(Before that, Koda says, “we were like a benign tumor.”) For a diminishing number of aesthetic purists, though, questions lingered: Was clothing design really art? Did the department’s close connections to the fashion trade undermine its curatorial integrity, and, if so, did it belong at the Met? Their rigorously focussed exhibitions were admired both inside and outside the museum, leading curators in other departments to view the Costume Institute in a more collegial light.

Her exhibitions of “Romantic and Glamorous Hollywood Design,” “The Glory of Russian Costume,” and other pizzazz-generating subjects drew big crowds, and the Costume Institute’s annual benefit began living up to its hopeful title as the “Party of the Year.” Vreeland’s successors, Richard Martin and Harold Koda, took a more scholarly approach. Things changed dramatically in 1972, when Diana Vreeland took over. For three decades, housed in a ground-floor space under the Egyptian galleries, the Costume Institute served mainly as a resource to other departments, and its exhibitions attracted a core audience of society matrons and the Seventh Avenue retailers who had agreed to raise the money for the institute’s operating costs. The Metropolitan Museum of Art shows what its seigneurial former director, Philippe de Montebello, liked to call “every category of art in every known medium from every part of the world during every epoch of recorded time.” Some categories there are more prominent than others, of course, and until quite recently the art of clothing design, which arrived with the formation of the Costume Institute, in 1946, had ranked rather low in the curatorial hierarchy.

Alexander McQueen by Andrew Bolton