Fashion has always sat uncomfortably in the great art institutions of the West, the question of whether it belonged under the same roof as masterworks and heroic marbles a subject of perennial debate. After all, these creations weren’t hung on a wall or put on a pedestal; they were (cue dismissive sniff) worn. They may have been a part of pop culture, but could they really be classed with high culture?

In London and Paris the answer was to relegate dress to separate museums of decorative arts — the Victoria & Albert and Musée des Arts Décoratifs. And in New York, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art may have swallowed its pride in 1946 and deigned to accept the clothes, it put the new fashion department in … the basement. Talk about a metaphor for museum hierarchies.

This week, however, the Condé M. Nast galleries, a 12,000-square-foot permanent space, is being unveiled for the Costume Institute. The galleries have replaced the former museum gift shop, just to the right of the information desk in the Great Hall. Rather than being hidden below ground, the fashion department is now the first thing people see when they enter the museum.

Shh. Listen. Hear that? It is the sound of 80 years of argument ending.

And it is a reflection of the simple fact that it is now fashion that gets people through the doors of these august — some might say old — institutions. It’s the thing everyone can relate to and comfortably opine on, unlike, say, de Kooning, because, hey, everyone wears clothes.

If in doubt, simply consider that of the 10 most-visited Met exhibitions in modern history, half of them were Costume Institute exhibitions. No other department is represented more than once. Or consider “Costume Art,” the exhibition that opens the new space.

This year’s fashion blockbuster — the one celebrated by the Met Gala on Monday night — “Costume Art” both acknowledges fashion’s role as the new entry point to the museum and makes the case for why the change is long overdue. It’s as if the exhibition were holding out its hand and saying to all who enter, “Hello, let me be your guide to the treasures we have throughout this place.”

The show suggests that fashion — or “the dressed body” — is the essential connective tissue of the 17 different departments and 19 collecting areas of the Met, the one element present in every discipline, no matter what century or art form is under discussion. It does this by pairing approximately 200 garments and accessories with 200 pieces of art borrowed from across the museum’s six miles of galleries.

You see the connection from the moment you enter the soaring new space, through an anteroom just off the Great Hall, dedicated to what is now termed “naked dressing.” Think Dilara Findikoglu’s 2023 sheer dress with strategically placed coils of hair, like Lady Godiva fashion cosplay, paired with an 18th century Venetian bronze nude, the hands strategically placed just like the hair. That’s one way to hook ‘em.

It’s no accident that the entry also includes a double-sided vitrine that houses four mannequins. Two of them face outward toward the grand staircase and wear sheer body stockings, one by Vivienne Westwood and one by Andrea Adamo, each with a silver fig leaf over their nether regions. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator in charge, has never been afraid of playing to the crowd.

Created by Miriam Peterson and Nathan Rich of the architecture firm Peterson Rich, which also designed the exhibition, the galleries have been conceived to fit seamlessly into the existing semiology of the museum. They are floored in white granite, replete with classic pedestals and platforms, and bathed in a soft glow (since fabric is too fragile to be exposed to daylight, this has been created by recessed uplighting). It’s as if the new galleries had always been there; as if fashion had always belonged.

Rather than dress up the exhibition with fancy scenography, or guest film directors as Bolton has often done in the past, the space allows the interplay between fashion and the rest of the galleries to sit front and center. It is, after all, a relatively straightforward idea: an Issey Miyake molded gold breastplate and a mini-me Etruscan cuirass! A Fortuny pleated Delphos gown and a Greek terra-cotta vase featuring a figure in a pleated gown! A Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons armless felted construction and a stone Henry Moore with the exact same curves.

And really, it’s hard to argue with the connection between Van Gogh’s “Irises” and the Yves Saint Laurent jacket that reproduced that painting in sequins, or the Loewe shirt by Jonathan Anderson that did the same on a feather-festooned couture version of a concert tee.

But such banal relationships are actually few and far between in the show, which is after something deeper and more complicated. There is, thankfully, no Mondrian “Broadway Boogie Woogie” with matching dresses in the exhibition; no Warhol soup cans and Warhol soup can shifts.

Warhol is represented, natch, but by a Richard Avedon portrait of the artist’s bullet-scarred torso, juxtaposed against a Coperni dress, its slashes resected with silver spirals. Even those Van Gogh irises turn out to be linked not just by flowers, but by the mental health struggles of the men who made the works, the way both the designer Chet Lo’s gowns covered in little knit spikes and Picasso’s “The Blind Man’s Meal” reflect the importance of tactile understanding.

Indeed, the organizing principle of the show, rather than chronology, is the body itself: both the kinds of bodies that distinguish us, and the bodily experiences we share. And that is the product of a fairly radical rethinking of how fashion relates to art.

For decades, the justifications for considering fashion as an art form involved denaturing it, separating it from its practical purpose and corporeal reality, and focusing instead on its textile value — embroidery, beading, decoration — or its construction. With this show, Bolton is slyly subverting that idea, suggesting instead that it is fashion’s dependence on the body itself that makes it central to any and all art practices: That the real connective issue between fashion and art is the way in which both are used to challenge and shape perception — of the body, of beauty; of who we are and how we see. Understanding the one helps to understand the other.

That’s why the clothes in this exhibition often sit atop the art, a subtle upending of the traditional status quo that speaks to both Bolton’s thesis and the department’s new status. It’s also why the exhibit layout serves to guide you through a maze of bodily types in its two main galleries, the Thom Browne gallery, and the Michael Kors and Lance Le Pere gallery. Among them are the classical body, the corpulent body, the disabled body, the pregnant body, the inscribed body, the anatomical body and the mortal body.

(The terminology, the product of consultation with different interest groups, can be a little abstruse, but the taxonomy has led to one real change: the creation of mannequins beyond the unrealistically thin and sylphlike.)

You don’t have to get any of this to enjoy the show, of course. It may be less magical than some Costume Institute shows such as 2011’s “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” 2018’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and even last year’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” But it is delightful to happen upon an unexpected treasure, such as a miniature Egyptian Omphale figure that seems to glow from within, or Fred Tomaselli’s 1992 work “Behind Your Eyes,” a life-size male nude with a body built out of pills that the Met acquired in 2019 but that has never been shown. Or, for that matter, to discover the beauty in the blood red venous structures of a Robert Wun gown, like a flayed dress.

The fashion masters (Worth, Vionnet, Kawakubo and so on) are all here, sure, like the old masters, but so are many more names most people will not know. As a sign of what sort of role fashion is going to play in the Met going forward, “Costume Art” is a clear statement of intent.

The last room in the exhibition acts as a bookend to the first, focusing not on nudity, but on skin itself before disgorging visitors into the Byzantine galleries. Anders Bergstrom’s wrenching “Brown Bag Test,” which wrestles with early-20th-century racism and the way skin tones were used for discrimination, is there, along with Christian Louboutin’s set of “Hot Chick” stiletto shoes in eight different shades of nude. Both are set against the backdrop of the original brick and concrete outer wall of the Met, which was hidden when the Great Hall and grand entry staircase were added in 1902.

The wall was uncovered when the gift shop was demolished, and it has been left in its original state, as if to remind you that it, too, has been here all along. It’s just that, like the foregrounding of fashion in art, it took this long for everyone to realize it. Now that they have, there is room for an even more interesting question: What’s next?

Cinematography by Jensen Gore.

Costume Art

Members Preview, May 5, 7-9; opens May 10 — Jan. 10, 2027, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.

Donlyn Lyndon was a year or two out of architecture school when he and a few of his Princeton classmates set up what they called a “weekend practice” in Berkeley, Calif. They all had day jobs; Mr. Lyndon’s was teaching architecture.

It was the early 1960s, and the members of the group were, as the critic Robert Campbell put it, dropouts from Modernism, the orthodoxy of the moment. They shared a belief in a more humane and flexible architecture, one that allowed for the sensibilities of the people who would inhabit their buildings and that acknowledged the particular landscapes those buildings would inhabit.

They had been in business for only about an hour, Mr. Lyndon later joked, when they were invited to collaborate on an unusual project.

An architect turned developer named Al Boeke had envisioned a new kind of community on 5,200 acres of a former sheep ranch overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a few hours north of San Francisco — with buildings shaped by, and in deference to, the wild, windswept landscape.

Mr. Boeke hired Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architect who would later be celebrated for his work on Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco and many other urban plazas and parks; Joseph Esherick, an established Bay Area architect; and, at Mr. Halprin’s suggestion, Mr. Lyndon and his “weekend practice” partners, Charles Moore, William Turnbull Jr. and Richard Whitaker, who used their initials to name their new firm, MLTW.

The architects’ job was to design prototypes for buildings that others could follow — but they were suggestions, not prescriptions, Mr. Lyndon often said. The site was breathtaking, a sweep of meadowland that extended to the bluffs along a 10-mile stretch of coastline divided by hedgerows of half-century-old cypress trees.

It was Mr. Halprin’s radical idea to nestle some of the structures against the hedgerows and leave the meadows — in developer’s terms, the prime real estate — untouched. Mr. Esherick’s firm sketched out a clutch of diminutive, low-slung houses clad in redwood shingles with shed roofs tucked into a line of cypress.

MLTW’s assignment was to create something bolder, to show how larger structures could adapt to more exposed land; their site was a promontory with no shelter from the elements.

They designed a condominium building of 10 connected dwellings. Although it was a second-home community, their intention was to craft a kind of village, with common areas like the open meadows and other spaces that encouraged connections among neighbors.

The Sea Ranch, as the larger development would be called, was conceived, Mr. Lyndon wrote, as “a limited partnership — not a marriage — between the buildings and the land.”

He died on April 5 at his home there, his daughter Laura Lyndon said, almost two months after the death of his wife of 63 years, the artist Alice Wingwall. He was 90.

What he and his colleagues created was a stunning departure for its time: a collection of small, loft-like “houses” made from rough-hewn redwood planks, with enormous windows that framed the views, unified by a sloping shed roof to deflect the wind. It paid homage to the barns of the area with its post-and-beam construction and unpainted vertical cladding.

Though it had the unlovely name of Condominium One — they imagined other such structures would follow; they did not — what they built became an “icon of American architecture,” as the critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times in 1997, when Mr. Turnbull died. (It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.)

Condominium One had the effect of raising a finger to the glass-and-steel boxes of the Modernist canon. It became a destination for generations of architectural pilgrims, with its funky, relaxed aesthetic serving as an inspiration for a new California style that would be replicated in ski and beach houses across the country.

Herbert Muschamp, writing in The Times in 1993, when Mr. Moore died, said that the group had elevated “the form of the simple shed to architectural grandeur.”

Mr. Esherick died in 1998; Mr. Halprin, in 2009; Mr. Boeke, in 2011; and Mr. Whitaker, in 2021.

Mr. Lyndon, who became a prominent academic and author, leading the architecture departments at the University of Oregon, M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley, was the last living member of the Sea Ranch gang, a bearded elder and longtime steward of the ethos and ideals they set forth.

“They were more like a band than an office,” Kevin Keim, the director of the Charles Moore Foundation in Austin, said of the members of MLTW in an interview. “They complemented each other in all kinds of ways. They often said their design mode was to sit at a round table with only one pencil between them, and if your idea faltered, you handed it to the next guy.” (The story, he allowed, may have been apocryphal.)

Mary Griffin, an architect who studied with Mr. Lyndon at M.I.T. and went on to marry and work with Mr. Turnbull, said: “Donlyn was the intellectual. He built with words.”

Like many great bands, they soon broke up — in their case, after their initial work at the Sea Ranch was completed, in 1965. Not because of any discord, but because other opportunities beckoned. Mr. Lyndon headed to Oregon, and then Cambridge, Mass., finally returning to Berkeley in 1978.

With his former colleague Mr. Moore and another co-author, Gerald Allen, he wrote “The Place of Houses” (1974), a gentle anti-manifesto that did not prescribe one style over another. It was a plain-spoken, poetic guide to how to think about making a home — the order of rooms, the placement of windows — using examples from a Japanese teahouse, Palladian villas and, yes, the Sea Ranch, places that were touchstones for the authors and examples of shapes and spaces that made people feel good. (Mr. Lyndon loved a bay window, and nooks to curl up in.)

Some critics saw the book as a paean to nostalgia, but others praised its humanism and lack of pretense. Jane Holtz Kay of The Nation called it “a consciousness raiser for houses.” Mr. Campbell of The Boston Globe described it as “a cleareyed blast at conventional wisdom of every sort on the subject of houses.”

As Mr. Lyndon and his co-authors wrote: “Anyone who cares enough can create a house of great worth — no anointment is required. If you care enough you just do it. You bind the goods and trappings of your life together with your dreams to make a place that is uniquely your own. In doing so, you build a semblance of the world you know, adding it to the community that surrounds you.”

Donlyn Lyndon was born on Jan. 7, 1936, in Detroit. His mother, Dorothea (Zentgrebe) Lyndon, was an educator. His father, Maynard Lyndon, was an architect who chose his eldest son’s first name for its euphony with their surname, creating what Donlyn — who never answered to Don — approvingly called “a syllabic palindrome.”

Donlyn won a scholarship to Princeton, where he studied architecture, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1957 and his master’s in 1959. He met Alice Atkinson, an artist, at Berkeley; they married in 1963.

When she began to go blind in her 30s because of a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, she turned from sculpture to photography. In 1980, she changed her surname to Wingwall, inspired by the broken wing of a stone angel on a building in Rome. “I have a broken wing, too,” she said. (Mr. Lyndon embraced it: “What does Wingwall think?” was a common refrain in their household.)

The house Mr. Lyndon built for them at the Sea Ranch was decorated in her favorite colors: orange, yellow and red, the last color she was able to see.

In addition to their daughter Laura, Mr. Lyndon is survived by another daughter, Audrey Lyndon; a son, Andrew; five grandchildren; a brother, Maynard; and a sister, Jo Lyndon.

Mr. Lyndon was the author, with Mr. Moore, of “Chambers for a Memory Palace” (1994), an architectural world tour and epistolary dialogue between two lions of architecture about the design of places they loved. Mr. Lyndon’s history of the place he loved most, “The Sea Ranch: Fifty Years of Architecture, Landscape, Place and Community on the Northern California Coast,” with photos by Jim Alinder, was published in 2004 and revised in 2013.

There are now more than 1,800 houses at the Sea Ranch, at least 10 of which Mr. Lyndon had a hand in designing, though it did not exactly evolve into the environmental utopia its creators envisioned.

A design committee still reviews all new construction and landscaping, but as development has intensified, the houses have grown larger. Climate change has brought additional challenges: finding building materials that are fire-safe, and firescaping the land, particularly the hedgerows, which are dying off.

“Place, and its nurture,” Mr. Lyndon and Mr. Allen wrote in the revised edition of “The Place of Houses,” published in 2000, “remains an essential breeding ground for civic virtue. The sustenance of our democratic republic, we believe, demands it.”