When Too Much Is Just Right "I JUST WENT to this amazing party in Venice," said Barbara Berger as she walked into the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel on Monday morning, lugging a cheap red wheelie to a table in the lobby. Ms. Berger is 70 (though you would never guess it), and a lifelong jewelry enthusiast whose impressive collection of costume pieces will be the subject of an exhibition opening Tuesday at the Museum of Arts and Design. Wearing a red kurta and a silver necklace with a smiley face pendant, she unzipped her suitcase, from which she plucked a delicately wrapped, incredibly large mask made of crystals, synthetic cat's eye and filigree that she had worn to a party at the Biennale. "It's the most uncomfortable thing I ever wore in my life," she said. The mask, by Timothy Szlyk of Thorin & Co., was her latest acquisition, which Ms. Berger planned to hand over to the museum. The funny thing is that I brought this through customs, and they didn't say anything. The mask will join what already promises to be a staggering display of bejeweled body art; historic costume pieces from designers both famous (Chanel, Versace and Balenciaga) and obscure; one necklace made of, among other things, plastic frogs, and several pieces by designers whose target audience is usually drag queens. Ms. Berger, who lives in Mexico City with her second husband, Mauricio Berger, who owns fine-jewelry and watch stores there, knows her jewelry. Her first husband, Silvio Cohen, was also a jeweler. Her father, Albert Grafstein, was a diamond dealer, and she bought her first pair of Chanel earrings at a Paris flea market when she was only 13. A little over a decade ago, Ms. Berger spotted Karl Lagerfeld at the Café de Flore in Paris and spontaneously showed him some Chanel pieces, which led to the first major exhibition of her work, at Les Arts Décoratifs. It was called "Trop," as in "too much." Assouline recently published "Fashion Jewelry," a book about her collection, which has on its cover the frog necklace, a piece by the Antwerp artist Daniel Von Weinberger. She is as attracted to period pieces from Maison Gripoix, Nettie Rosenstein and Miriam Haskell as she is to the raunchier work of BillyBoy from the 1980s. "For me, it's about the find," Ms. Berger said. C'est la chasse.