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.
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