"Interwoven Globe," a 300-Year Survey of Textiles at the Met Mind your footwear. Few New York art seasons are fully under way until the Metropolitan Museum of Art rolls out a fall exhibition with enough visual thrills and historical insights to knock your socks off. Yet this year's offering may be even more outstanding than usual. "Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800," opening on Monday, is a staggering overview of more than three centuries of art, commerce, craft and cross-cultural fertilization. Philip Greenberg for The New York Times Interwoven Globe A palampore in cotton silk woven on India's Coromandel Coast for the European market in the mid-18th century, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Crisscrossing cultures in Europe, the Americas, Asia and India, this exhibition retraces the world's early oceanic trade routes, using examples of the fabrics and finished textiles that traveled along them, spreading ideas about design, technique and fashion that were imitated and adapted by people in far-flung locales. The result is a feast of transcendent artifacts variously embroidered, woven, dyed and printed, and one of the great art experiences of the season. Hybridity, a favored buzzword in the art world these days, is shown to be as old as the sea. Organized by geography and theme, the show unfolds in nine galleries, and each feels like its own treasure chest, worthy of hours of pleasurable study. All told, the exhibition presents some 130 textiles and nearly 30 garments, along with a smattering of related paintings, prints and books. There are quilts and bedcovers, tapestries and wall hangings, and curtains both domestic and religious. Among the wearables are shawls and capes, kimonos and vestments, jackets and lavish ball gowns made of imported silks. Adding to the complexity, the motifs throughout the show are derived from natural forms when they aren't figurative, which gives many works a great pictorial punch and, sometimes, narrative import. History itself is present, as in a rather daunting suite of tapestries depicting four continents that was commissioned by Louis XVI but arrived too late for him to enjoy. The French Revolution intervened. An implicit celebration of the triumph of European power and colonialism, they are being exhibited together for the first time with their matching settees and armchairs. This imperial ostentation is countered in adjacent galleries by textiles that expose the less benign side of global trade. Two elaborate Indian hangings, one painted and one embroidered, offer finely detailed accounts of clashes between colonial and indigenous forces. Opposite these is an English quilt printed with repeating scenes of encounters between Captain Cook and indigenous inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), including his killing by local residents. In the next gallery, a swath of cotton printed in France protests the African slave trade with alternating scenes of civilized Africans and barbaric white men. Most of the textiles are drawn from the Met's collection but have been exhibited rarely, if at all. Because of their hybrid nature, they often don't fit cleanly into displays built around specific cultures. Bringing everything together required a collaboration of curators from nine departments - a record for the Met - overseen by Amelia Peck, a curator in the museum's department of American decorative arts who also edited the show's magnificent catalog. Some items originated from commissions by visiting merchants and dignitaries; others were designed by local entrepreneurs to cater to foreign tastes. Such enterprise was especially fertile in India, which produced textiles not only for markets in Europe and America but also for those of Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and Sri Lanka. These include an 18th-century cotton jacket that has been intricately painted and dyed for the King of Siam's royal guard, its back dominated by the large face of a grotesque demon. A leitmotif in several galleries is the Indian palampore, a cotton bedcover or wall hanging depicting a tree of life surrounded by scrolling vine-and-flower patterns. These are the mother of all chintz (a variant of a Hindi word) and may well have originated in England and been sent to India as a template. But the Indians made them their own, producing versions in embroidered or dyed cotton that, in turn, inspired textile producers around the globe. The Indian genius for elaborate dying and painting processes was a particular challenge to equal. The palampore narrative begins in the third gallery with an early-18th-century example made in India but with Japanese styling (a lacquerlike darkness and motif) that was intended to appeal to Dutch tastes of the moment. An especially extravagant example (sixth gallery) is a mid-18th-centry Indian palampore embroidered in bright silk on gold cotton. A tree sprouts from a hillock reminiscent of a Chinese scholar's rock, and its flowers - fantastical to the point of being otherworldly - are so finely stitched that they hardly seem handmade. The palampore saga culminates in the exhibition's final gallery in a tree-of-life face-off: an Indian dyed version made for Dutch markets, an American appliqué version that resembles an extra-large piece of needlework and a spare, pale, almost neurasthenic Chinese rendition in shimmery silk embroidery on silk satin. "Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800" runs from Monday through Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org.