The Costume Institute is housed within the Metropolitan Museum of Art but exists in a separate universe, one with its own galleries, budget, press representative and aesthetic protocols. To some this fashion-world apart is a Martian oddity, to others it is a vital preserve of Venusian luxe. Either way — and for better and worse — it has never been as fully integrated with the Met as it is in the exhibition that opened this week called “China: Through the Looking Glass.”

Designed to illustrate the influence of Chinese culture on Western fashion, the show is spread over three floors. It fills both the basement-level Anna Wintour Costume Center and the Chinese galleries on the second floor, and claims a repurposed Egyptian space in between. In terms of real estate, the show is one of the museum’s largest ever. And it feels large, exhaustingly so, with acres of objects, photographs, film clips and apparel punched up by sound-and-light special effects.

In a way, it’s all just fashion business as usual, the product of a culture that speaks a language of overkill. In this case, though, a smaller, better show is all but buried: a nuanced historical essay on cultural hybridity, the mixing of styles and ideas over space and time that leaves every culture equal in its impurity to every other culture.

It’s a particularly apt theme for this show, which celebrates the centenary of the Met’s Asian department and an art collection that has done so much to shape how something called Asia has been defined and received in something called the West.