NEW YORK, Dec 18, 2001/ --- Last week marked the opening of Harold Koda's first major exhibit as curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute.

"Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed" chronicles the corsets and bustiers, petticoats and panniers, that women have strapped on - often despite much discomfort - in the name of beauty.

"Extreme Beauty" travels through history and over the length of the human form. Organized by body part - head and shoulders, chest, waist, hips and feet - the installation includes brass neck coils that women of the Padaung in Burma wear to lengthen their necks (in fact, the contraption pushes down the shoulders to create the illusion of a giraffe-like neck) and the tiny shoes worn by Chinese women, feet bound to permanently fold over their toes in emulation of a "Golden Lotus."

Most items in the show, however, are from the last 20 years and came from Western Europe or the United States. Fashion innovators like John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake are all represented.

Thierry Mugler's 1995 cyborg suit stands next to Alexander McQueen's sterling silver bustier for Givenchy Haute Couture. A baby blue Playboy bunny outfit and Gaultier's conical bras worn in Madonna's "Blonde Ambition" tour also perk up the chest portion of the exhibition.

Female erogenous zones aren't the only ones to get attention in this show though. A case filled with New Guinean penis gourds stands out as an example of some of the lengths (no pun intended, of course) men will go through to make their assets more attractive.

Fashion can of course be functional: This exhibit includes the wooden prosthetic boots that model -- and amputee -- Aimee Mullins wore for McQueen's spring 1999 show. But it can also be physically destructive. The foot section of the show juxtaposes two X-rays: one of a shriveled, bound foot, the other of an arch misshapen by a lifetime in high-heels.

Koda writes in the "Extreme Beauty" catalogue that perhaps, "the only mechanism for the demise of a faddish style is the physical limit of the body to suffer its intervention." It remains to be seen if this new fashion survey will inspire masochistic style mavens to abandon what this curator dubs "fashion as extreme sport" - and their Manolos along with it.