VITAL STATS

OCCUPATION: Head curator, Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
AGE: 57
RESIDENCE: New York City
FIRST JOB: Assistant, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department of Sotheby's
BEST JOB: Making 18th century wigs, Sergei Diaghilev props, Manchu Dynasty fingernail guards, and an 18th century parasol for Diana Vreeland's exhibitions
GREATEST PROFESSIONAL CHALLENGE: Keeping up with e-mails.
SALARY DURING 20s: $14,000 per year

Harold Koda spends his days convincing people that clothes can be art. Considering the types of garments and textiles that pass through his hands as head curator of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, it's not such a stretch. During the past seven years, Koda has overseen exhibits showcasing luminaries such as Coco Chanel, the iconic wardrobe of Jacqueline Onassis, antique gowns and accessories of royalty throughout the ages, as well as clothing by today's innovators: Issey Miyake, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Tom Ford, Miuccia Prada, and Georgio Armani, among countless others.

Born in Honolulu, Koda's trajectory to fashion was anything but direct. He dabbled as a human rights champion at the American Civil Liberties Union, then as a Civil War historian in Fort Point, San Francisco (the employer misheard "history" instead of "art history" as his major), and finally a rare books handler at Sotheby's before his worship of garb landed him in an 11-year stint at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, which eventually led him to the Costume Institute. We asked him how someone who's obsessed with fashion gets anointed as the curatorial king of clothes.

READYMADE: Hi, Harold. How did you get that f*&^%$ awesome job?
HAROLD KODA:Like many people, I have competency in a few areas, but excellence - that is, breathtaking virtuosity - in none. Pair that with a personality that leans less to likes than dislikes, and the move toward my career was a kind of exfoliating process.

When I decided to get into the fashion business, I had studied pictures of Andy Warhol and Halston at parties in Interview voraciously, and wanted to be at that intersection of the art and fashion worlds. My solution was to use my museum training internship at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU to get a foot in the door at The Costume Institute. I believed, improbably, that when Mrs. Vreeland saw my work, I would be launched on a career in fashion.

But Mrs. Vreeland was on her summer vacation when I started on my first project - to replicate the missing silk sleeve on an 18th century dress on an awful piece of polyester! But everyone loved the work so they gave me another assignment: to dress an 1880s mourning gown with a bunch of buckram, muslin, and twill tape. Somehow I was able to figure it out and the gown turned out beautifully proportioned.

A year later, I was recommended for an associate curator position at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and that's finally how the ball got rolling!

Nowadays, my story would be completely improbable. Unless they're part of a graduate program, volunteers now are non-existent, and a master's degree is required for even our most junior positions. Looking back at my picaresque beginnings, it looks like I had the opportunistic career strategy of Moll Flanders or Tom Jones, but, of course, without the juicy bits.

RM: I read that you left your job in fashion a while ago to study landscape architecture at Harvard because "fashion was [then] at a moribund moment." How would you describe the industry now?
HK: Looking back, it was not fashion that was at a moribund moment; it was me. [But] I kept all my fashion magazine subscriptions while I was up in Cambridge. Miuccia was exploding, Galliano had settled in at Dior, so many new edgy fashion-driven publications were jostling for attention, and the burgeoning presence of fashion coverage on the web ... all combusting just at the point I left! Today, the excitement is actually a condition of a kind of fashion crisis. There is beauty, originality, conceptual audacity in many of the collections, but the greatest pieces and collections from the perspective of aesthetic innovation are often completely estranged from the reality of day-to-day life. The business of fashion seems poised for a paradigm shift. And this kind of tension generally resolves itself through innovation.

RM: What do you make of the "democratization" of fashion, with big-name designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and Stella McCartney designing lines for mass chains like H&M?
HK: There has always been a filter-down aspect to high fashion. Since the sixties, however, there's also been the reverse phenomenon of the street inspiring and influencing the upper reaches of the design hierarchy. For designers who have become celebrities in their own right to extend their brand-the franchise of their identity as much as their designs-to the mass market is wonderful! High fashion has become very expensive, so a strategy of creating collections that target the design-conscious with smaller pockets is brilliant.

RM: Do fashion designers shape the coming trends more these days or is street culture still the prevailing filter?
HK: Fashion today comes from a wide range of sources. Designers are an explicit source. The street, which is frequently credited as a design source, is only the originating point of how to wear things. Designs still originate with designers, though trends are either confirmed or emerge through the street. It is a symbiotic relationship. Even the most original stylists need fresh components with which to cobble their "looks."

RM: What do you have your eye on now?
HK: I'm co-curating an exhibition on Paul Poiret, based on a group of pieces we acquired from the personal collection of Denise Poiret, the designer's wife. So, ostensibly I'm immersed in the early decades of the 20th century. But the reality is I'm obsessed with the Directoire, the period following the French Revolution. The fashion victims of all time: the incroyables and merveilleuse! Tight tailoring, ethereal gowns, romantically infused classicism, effete sexuality without androgyny, wild hair in hedgehog perms and proto mullets, red ribbons around the neck as an accessory alluding to aristocratic decapitation-I can't get enough of it.

RM: What's your most ambitious, far-reaching goal for the Institute?
HK: The big unglamorous goal is to edit and re-house the collection. We have so many great works, but many secondary works also. The big glamorous goal is to expand the galleries in our existing footprint. The Costume Institute has been in this corner of the museum since 1946. I want galleries that live up to the grandeur of our collection.