The first time I checked out the Women Dressing Women exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few weeks ago, one particular dress in the middle of the Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery caught my eye: a silver silk gown embroidered with glass beads, metal, and feathers. As a fashion novice who found the Met’s blockbuster 2011 exhibit devoted to Alexander McQueen genuinely revelatory, this gown screamed McQueen’s ornately gothic sensibility. When I got closer to the piece and saw the display text, however, I discovered I was at best only half-right. The dress was, in fact, the creation of Sarah Burton, who took over the McQueen fashion house after his suicide in 2010.

Sure, I could chalk it up to plain ignorance on my part of the ins and outs of the contemporary fashion world since only after looking Burton up online did I learn that she had recently left the house after a highly regarded 13-year tenure. But if this exhibit, curated by Costume Institute associate curator Mellissa Huber and Met associate curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven, has any value at all—and to my mind, it has plenty—it lies in forcing the spectator to question one’s own ingrained gender biases in the creative arts.

That polemical point may not be one’s immediate impression upon entering the exhibit, however. Instead, standing in the middle of the Tisch Gallery may well induce a feeling of dizziness at the sheer variety of colors, patterns, and materials surrounding you. And I do mean “surrounding”: Dresses, blazers, and gowns line three of the four walls of the gallery, with maybe about 20 more fascinatingly arranged pieces in the center. Most of my initial visit consisted of simply gawking at the visual cornucopia right in front of us, with, at best, only superficial glances at the display texts and the arrangement of the various pieces.

Take a closer look at the texts and arrangements, however, and an entire argument quietly asserts itself. Women Dressing Women is divided into four sections, given the names “Anonymity,” “Visibility,” “Agency,” and “Absence/Omission.” Roughly speaking, “Anonymity,” which is made up of the pieces lining the three walls of the Tisch Gallery, and “Absence/Omission,” which makes up one-half of the center of the gallery, evoke some of the challenges women still face in the fashion industry. Meanwhile, the France-dominated “Visibility,” which has its own side room to itself, and “Agency,” which takes up the other half of the gallery’s center, celebrate the strides individual women made over the course of the 20th century in rising up the ranks of couture houses.

Even within those broad outlines, however, there are telling nuances. Though two dresses designed by legendary designers Madame Grès and Rei Kawakubo—both of whom had previously been subjects of retrospectives at the Met—greet you as go down the stairs to the Costume Institute wing, and the front of the Tisch Gallery highlights a handful of gowns designed by a holy trinity of Madeleine Vionnet, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, the exhibit is also full of relatively unfamiliar names. Though throughout the 1920s and ’30s, female designers outnumbered men, especially in France, most of those names rang nary a bell to me as I wandered through the “Visibility” section especially. Marie-Louise Boulanger? Madeleine Lepeyre? I had not a clue, and yet Lepeyre’s slinky, pink evening dress couldn’t help but catch my eye.

And, of course, as the past gradually catches up to the present, Women Dressing Women naturally shines a light on those who designed for something other than the traditional thin waif-like female body type. A couple of pieces from Georgina Godley’s “lump and bump” collection—in which the British designer, inspired by African fertility dolls, inserted padded underwear beneath Lycra dresses—are a part of this show. So is a black “going out” dress designed by Jasmin Søe for her brand Customiety that fits well on a person with achondroplasia. The exhibit also highlights designers working to expand fashion’s reach in non-white and LGBTQ+ communities, as evidenced by the inclusion of a white nylon “One Titty Dress” designed by Pia Davis and Autumn Randolph for the fashion house No Sesso, which designs clothing for Black queer, trans, and non-binary folk; and a black silk satin “parfleche” dress designed by Native American designer Jamie Okuma.

Towards the end of my second visit to Women Dressing Women, I noticed a piece that I strangely hadn’t noticed in my previous visit: a white dress with blue paint smeared on it designed by Phoebe Philo, formerly of the fashion house Céline. But the blue-smeared paint, rather than being random or formless, suggested the imprint of a nude female body pressed onto it. Does the paint really do what the wall text suggested of “de-objectif[ying] and reinvigorat[ing] the woman’s absent body”? That may well depend on the individual spectator, man, woman, or otherwise. But it at least offers a thought-provoking summation of the exhibition’s mission as a whole: expanding our ways of thinking not only about the surface visual qualities of fashion but of the many female creators working behind the scenes.

The Women Dressing Women exhibit runs through March 3 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.