After 14 years of overseeing ambitious, crowd-pleasing shows like “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” in 2011 and the recent “China: Through the Looking Glass,” which have helped put the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the crossroads of glamour, fashion, scholarship and art, Harold Koda is retiring as curator in charge of the museum’s Costume Institute. On Tuesday the Met board chose Andrew Bolton, his fellow curator, to succeed him.

Mr. Koda’s tenure included transferring the Brooklyn Museum’s costume collection to the Met in 2009; reopening the expanded Costume Institute in 2014 after a two-year renovation; and helping to host, with the Vogue editor Anna Wintour, “the party of the year” — the annual Met Gala fund-raiser, which drew a record $12.5 million for the museum in 2015.

“It’s been an incredible time to be in this field,” Mr. Koda said in a telephone interview. “You’re in the catbird seat of fashion. You can observe and comment on contemporary fashion without any of the risks that designers, merchants and editors have to go through.”

The Honolulu-born Mr. Koda, 65 — who will step down in January — guided his department through significant changes since the days when it was institutionally marginal, relegated to the museum basement. He said he would be leaving the institute’s collection of 35,000 costumes and accessories in good hands, having worked closely with the British-born Mr. Bolton, 49, since bringing him to the department in 2002. Mr. Bolton, who worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London for nine years before joining the Met, said he had learned from Mr. Koda the value of juxtaposing the old and the new. “There’s almost a tonic effect,” he said. “Historical fashion informs contemporary fashion, and contemporary fashion enlivens historical fashion.”

With its choice, the board of directors may be signaling more than the quiet passing of a baton. Scholarship in the field has been radically redrawn in recent years to accommodate an evolving understanding of the sociocultural and even anthropological role of costume and fashion. Mr. Bolton brought a form of Imagineering showmanship to exhibitions that looked at fashion through the prism of punk rock; paired Elsa Schiaparelli with Miuccia Prada to create a feminist dialogue expressed through design; and proposed in the 2008 show “Superheroes” that Wonder Woman may have been as influential a style avatar as any fashion editor.

He has also organized two of the most popular shows in the museum’s history. Crowds lined up for hours in 2011 to view “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” the critically acclaimed and creatively installed retrospective of work by a visionary yet tortured designer, who was as much sculptor as dressmaker, and who committed suicide in 2010. The exhibition drew more than 661,000 visitors (at a time before the museum decided to remain open seven days a week).

More recently, Mr. Bolton shepherded “China: Through the Looking Glass,” which incorporated multiple departments. That three-floor show, which closed on Monday, drew about 816,000 visitors during its four-month run.

The challenge for the institute going forward is to keep an increasingly digital world coming in the door to see three-dimensional objects. The institute’s collection represents clothing and accessories from the 15th century to the present.

The department has been experimenting with various forms of technology, and Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director, said he expected that “we’ll see more” under Mr. Bolton.

Last year’s show “Charles James: Beyond Fashion,” for example, organized by Mr. Koda, featured robotic arms and screens near the dresses showing how they were constructed. The China show incorporated a life-size bamboo forest of illuminated Plexiglas wands, film selections assembled by the Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai and costumes ranging from imperial robes to a contemporary dress with a bodice made from blue-and-white porcelain.

“I love to engage more elements of technology into our exhibitions,” said Mr. Bolton, who favors boyish suits tailored by his partner, the designer Thom Browne, “to examine early examples of fashion that aren’t represented in the collection, like Elizabethan dress.”

With a more informed public constantly checking fashion blogs, the bar for the institute has been raised. “You can no longer present costume as, ‘Oh, isn’t this a pretty dress — it’s from the 1890s,’ ” Mr. Koda said. “You have to do it in a way that engages larger issues.”

The broad appeal of the institute’s shows can backfire with critics, who sometimes take the museum to task for pandering to the public or blurring the lines between art and commerce.

In her review of the 2013 show “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which Mr. Bolton organized, Roberta Smith of The New York Times wrote that “fashion has rarely looked as frivolous, beside the point and 1 percent-ish as here.”

And, while Holland Cotter in The Times commended the 2012 exhibition “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations” for its “tight thesis,” he also noted that “the primary sponsor for this exhibition is Amazon.com,” which “has recently initiated a major effort to sell high-end fashion online.”

Mr. Koda and Mr. Bolton say they often tire of having to defend their subject area as a legitimate art form that is not beholden to the fashion industry.

“There is this belief that you’re just puppets,” Mr. Koda said. “We don’t work for the brand, we work for the museum.”

“We’ve never said all clothing is art,” he added. “There can be certain design achievements that are so conceptually and technologically rich and innovative that they approach the standards and criteria of an artwork.”

Mr. Bolton expressed frustration that “people still cling to a 19th-century hierarchy of art.”

“The artistry of clothing as an aesthetic medium is just as important as painting and sculpture,” he said, “to offer new ways of looking at clothes and new ways of interpreting clothes through the lens of history and aesthetics, but through trends of culture or psychology.”

The Costume Institute has the strong support of the museum. Also crucial to the collection, which has costly storage and conservation requirements, has been the support of Ms. Wintour, who made possible the renovation. (It reopened last year as the Anna Wintour Costume Center.) “She’s our rainmaker,” Mr. Koda said.

Ms. Wintour said that the institute had been an important “resource for the fashion industry and for the public,” adding, “It puts fashion into a context that you don’t see anywhere else.”

While leading the institute, Mr. Koda built on the foundations laid by the visionary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who was installed as head of the Costume Institute by the former Met director Thomas Hoving, and followed by the art historian Richard Martin.

In addition to presenting shows focusing on single designers, the institute began to draw on the museum’s other collections in exhibitions like “Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century,” in 2004, which presented 33 pre-French Revolution garments in 18th-century French period rooms, or “AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion” in 2006, which crammed 65 mannequins into the Met’s normally serene English period rooms — with sound effects.

“I do try and tell a story — to start out with an overarching theme, then break it down,” Mr. Bolton said. “I really believe clothing carries all kinds of narratives. And it’s up to the curators to make them legible.”