After viewing the final gallery of Camp: Notes on Fashion, visitors are deposited into a bright gift shop, blinking as if after a matinee. While typical, the experience is jarring; after the multi-site “Heavenly Bodies” extravaganza, which infiltrated galleries throughout the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cloisters, this show was always going to feel smaller. But rest assured, the latest blockbuster from the museum’s Costume Institute has enough inspiration to go around in an immersive, multi-sensory journey through flowers and feathers and tulle.

The recurring question in this year’s pre-ball buzz was: What, exactly, is “Camp?” The curatorial team anticipated this question, and in answering it, they did what the Met does best: providing context for this artifice-based aesthetic with an oil painting of Louis XIV borrowed from Versailles itself, for example. Images of the Victorian cross-dressers Fanny and Stella are paired with Erdem gowns, and photos of Oscar Wilde sit with looks by Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci — all to the melancholy tune of Judy Garland singing Over the Rainbow.

There are delightful moments throughout the show (Cecil Beaton’s feathered pink Balenciaga gown sitting in a corner, a screen showing Malcolm McLaren’s Deep in Vogue music video), but the pièce de résistance is the sensation of walking into the final gallery, a cross between the Brady Bunch opener and a Roald Dahl fantasy, with multiple stories of colored boxes filled with extraordinary creations by the likes of Bob Mackie, Jeremy Scott, Thom Browne and Phoebe Philo (lest you forget, she designed lilac mink heels for Céline). It’s hard to pick standout pieces when everything’s meant to be just that, but Marc Jacobs’s eerie Maria Callas cape from Spring-Summer 2016 does stop a viewer, especially when paired with a custom veil by Stephen Jones. With relatively minimal beading, a House of Lesage gray skirt suit is a quieter highlight (a woman’s gold bugle tresses cascade down one sleeve).

“To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it,” Susan Sontag wrote in the 1964 essay that shapes the exhibition. But to see it is to feel, with inevitable delight, the breadth of its reach. Perhaps the best way to view “Camp” is to consider your next move; following it up with a wander through the rest of the museum’s galleries, for example, you can delight in world-class examples of Camp, as far as the eye can see.

Camp: Notes on Fashion is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 8.