After the Punks Comes ... Charles James. The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Wednesday that Charles James, the great 20th-century designer, will be the focus of its spring exhibition in May 2014, which is also when the museum unveils its renovated galleries. While the recently closed "Punk: Chaos to Couture" was not a favorite among designers (but nevertheless was successful), the idiosyncratic James, who died in 1978, is long revered in fashion but nevertheless mostly forgotten in the broader culture. The Costume Institute treatment could do for James what it did for Paul Poiret a few years back. The designer, described by the museum as "a genius in the art of sculpting fabric into inventive fashions," was the subject of an exhibition, "The Genius of Charles James," in 1982 at the Brooklyn Museum. After years of negotiations, the Costume Institute acquired the Brooklyn Museum's costume collection, including the James works, in 2009, and has set about restoring them ever since. James, who was born in England, started as a milliner in Chicago in 1926 and later opened his dressmaking business in New York. He was known primarily for his intricate, unorthodox working methods and dressed many of the most stylish women of the mid-century, including Millicent Rogers, Marlene Dietrich and Babe Paley. Dior credited James for having inspired the New Look of 1947. But James, whose inventions included the first fashionable down-filled jackets and numerous intricately constructed gowns with clover-shaped skirts, was a controversial, sometimes difficult designer and died in relative obscurity, living in the Chelsea Hotel for the last 14 years of his life. There's a lot there for the museum to explore.