Charles Frederick Worth, the nineteenth-century designer widely credited as the inventor of haute couture, was not a modest man. “Madame, on whose recommendation have you come to me?” he is said to have asked a prospective client at his Paris salon, a woman ready to pay the exorbitant fees generally required for his services. “If you wish to be dressed by me, you must have an introduction,” he explained. “I am an artist of the stature of Delacroix.”

Worth had good reason to be confident. His most important client, during a fifty-year career, was an empress, but tsarinas, society mavens, actresses, and courtesans all came to rely on his expertise. His “upholstery-style” gowns, laden with draperies, ruffles, embroideries, and fringe, illustrated to a rare degree the sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption.” At a time when a married woman’s ability to own property was severely restricted, a Worth dress signalled that its wearer was related—by blood, marriage, or the lust she was capable of inspiring—to at least one grand fortune. This was no small thing in a rapidly changing society, in which wealth, concentrated in the hands of the few, could be made or lost overnight.

Now visitors from our own rapacious era can cross Paris’s exuberantly gilded Pont Alexandre III (itself a product of the Belle Époque) and enter the airy halls of the circa-1900 Petit Palais, where “Worth, Inventing Haute Couture” will be on view through September 7th. Organized in collaboration with the Palais Galliera, the show features more than four hundred rarely exhibited works. Clothing, paintings, photographs, and objets d’art trace the House of Worth’s history from its founding, by Charles Frederick, during the age of crinolines, through its second flowering in the Edwardian era, when his sons Jean-Philippe and Gaston assumed control, and on to the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when his grandson Jean-Charles ushered Worth’s lavish style into the Jazz Age while launching perfumes, befriending artists, and posing naked in a series of photographs by Man Ray. Along the way, the show argues, the house set the template for many of the conventions and myths that still govern the creation of high fashion today.

“Opulence, theatricality, and historicism” were the hallmarks of Worth’s style, the fashion historian Sophie Grossiord, who co-curated the exhibition with Marine Kisiel and Raphaële Martin-Pigalle, explained one morning at the Petit Palais. She was standing next to a day jacket with a nipped-in waist, high neck, and puffed sleeves, made of midnight-blue velvet and appliquéd with arabesques of pale-violet satin. (On its wide Renaissance-style collar, the design is reversed: the arabesques are blue, the ground violet.)

This marvellous jacket was something that Renée, the tragically spendthrift heroine of Émile Zola’s novel “The Kill,” might have loved. Enmeshed one Parisian winter in a reckless affair with her stepson, Renée orders from her couturier, Worms, “a complete Polish suit . . . in velvet and fur” to go ice-skating with her young lover in the Bois de Boulogne. Zola conducted extensive research at the House of Worth for his portrait of Worms as a temperamental artist, servicing a society ruled by capital and addicted to luxury. Renée spends hours at the salon of “the couturier of genius to whom the great ladies of the Second Empire bowed down,” waiting alongside “a queue of at least twenty women.” When at last she stands before him, holding her breath, he “pondered with knit brows” before sketching an outfit for her while exclaiming in short phrases, “a Montespan dress in pale-grey faille . . . puffed apron of pearl-grey tulle.” Much of the novel is devoted to the ruthless scheming of Renée’s husband, Saccard, a property speculator intent on profiting from the vast geographical changes afoot in Haussman’s Paris. But Zola devotes his novel’s last words, after Renée’s sudden death, to a bill from Worms.

No mere dressmaker, Worth was the first designer who regularly imposed his own ideas on clients—telling a woman who wanted a blue dress that pink would suit her better, say. He was known for his ability to create gowns and costumes at tremendous speed; in a pinch, these could be sewn directly onto clients, with his last-minute adjustments. On the evening of a ball, for example, a crush of ladies would wait in line inside the house’s legendary address at 7 Rue de la Paix. They were each “given a ticket,” Diana de Marly, author of the 1980 biography “Worth: Father of Haute Couture,” recounts, “and served with Malmsey Madeira and pâté de foie.” (I also read these details in “The House of Worth, 1858-1954: The Birth of Haute Couture”—published in 2017 and co-authored by Charles Frederick’s great-great-granddaughter, Chantal Trubert-Tollu.)

Gazing at the results of his ministrations—bejewelled, fin-de-siécle fantasies of valkyries, infantas, Zenobias, and their ilk, arrayed on a row of mannequins at the Petit Palais—I found myself wondering what drove the members of European society to dress up as divinities or royal personages. Were they attempting to shore up an authority buffeted by repeated political reversals? In fact, there was considerable overlap between Worth’s costumes and the garments intended for his élite clients’ everyday lives, since their participation in society required them to appear continually “on parade.” Wealthy Americans, meanwhile, some flush with robber-baron fortunes, flocked to the house to acquire the sheen of aristocracy by association.

In a recent episode of HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon), the nouveau-riche wife of an American railroad tycoon, explains to her less cosmopolitan sister that her life often involves three to five changes of outfit per day. The exhibition offers up for our delectation silk taffeta robes à transformation, their wide skirts equipped with interchangeable bodices (sober and long-sleeved for daytime, daringly décolleté for evening); tea gowns with enormous gigot sleeves and lace yokes, for afternoons spent receiving friends at home; velvet cloaks, beribboned and befurred, for nights at the opera; and ethereal wrappers adorned with pale chiffon flowers, to cover the shoulders that a ball gown left bare.