Only a few people are lucky enough to have one great talent and passion that drives their career, according to Harold Koda.

“Their lives are easy because they have a dedication that’s unquestioned. There’s no digression or doubt. The rest of us have many talents but not one great talent. We get interested in a lot of things,” he said.

Born in Hawaii and a graduate of Aiea High School, Koda’s intellectual curiosity led him to one of the pinnacles of the museum world as curator in charge at The Costume Institute at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The institute’s collection of more than 35,000 ensembles represents seven centuries of fashionable dress and regional costumes, including by important designers of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Coco Chanel to Alexander McQueen.

After 15 years in his position, Koda, 65, is retiring at the end of the year, a coda he planned nearly 20 years ago when he was contemplating a second career in landscape architecture. Yet word of his retirement set tongues wagging.

“In New York when you say you’re going to retire, people act like you have Ebola or something because in New York your identity is purely professional, who you are in the hierarchy. People who know you know what you’re planning to do, but people who don’t know you assume you’ve been fired because no one leaves a really good job unless they’re leaving for a really great job,” said Koda, who was among the distinguished guests at last month’s Honolulu Fashion Week.

“So people have been asking me, ‘Are you OK?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, I’m really happy.’”

Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Tom Campbell said Koda has contributed to the field of costume in groundbreaking ways including landmark acquisitions, exhibitions and publications.

“During his time at the Met, Harold has brought great change to the department, including the transfer of the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection to the museum and the two-year renovation and reopening of its space as the Anna Wintour Costume Center last year.”

New York Fashion Week producer Lynne O’Neill, also from Hawaii, described Koda as one of the most prominent figures in the fashion world.

“The Costume Institute is a gatekeeper, if you will, to the history of fashion, how it is both integral to and reflective of period, culture, society,” she said. “Harold looked back and, more importantly, looked forward in presenting so many various aspects of fashion and was successful in tapping into and generating what would be of interest to us now.”

She said his exhibits inspired designers’ collections around the world.

To quiet gossips, Koda’s been telling people that he’s leaving to write books, but he says that backfired because now publishers are calling on him.

“I don’t really want to write books. What I really want to do is take classes — in psychology because I’m curious about the way the mind works, in photography and studio art classes not because I’m a really good artist, but because it gives me joy.”

He’s also interested in the intersection between science and art, such as fractals and mapping algorithms of nature to develop new ways of creating jewelry.

“I respond to the sculptural and three-dimensional more than other two-dimensional forms: clothing rather than textiles, sculpture rather than painting,” Koda said.

EVEN AS a child, Koda was attuned to fashion. His mom dressed him in khakis, dress shirts and black Oxfords, never brown. In the third grade he remembers favoring a Day-Glo green-and-yellow shirt.

“I was always given wide berth by my classmates. The biggest controversy was whether you wore socks with your sandals.”

Koda’s natural curiosity about the world and his love of art and beauty took him on a path open to all possibilities. He graduated from the University of Hawaii with bachelor’s degrees in English literature and art history. At UH he fell in love with African and Oceanic art and went on to pursue further studies at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

He arrived in New York at the height of 1970s disco culture and the Studio 54 era, and was drawn to the intersection of fashion, theater and performing arts.

“I was not an artist. I was not a performer, but I thought maybe I could be a designer like Halston or Issey Miyake.”

Coincidentally, one of his best friends had died, and “that made me think of life in a different way. I’m very conservative, but I decided I needed to do things not because I’m supposed to do them, but because I wanted to do them.”

It made him fearless, so he pushed forward with fashion, even if his first collection, while successful, also was his last.

In the 1970s the upscale Henri Bendel store held open calls to view work by new designers, so Koda bought up discontinued striped cotton washcloths and created five styles of modular tops, packing them tightly in a Duane Reade shopping bag.

In front of him at Henri Bendel were a Japanese couple offering beautiful hand-painted silk dresses and a woman in a 1930s-style blond coiffure and bright red lipstick who created designs from 19th-century embroidered Belgian linen.

“Really beautiful stuff, and there I was with my dish towels,” he said.

Both designers ahead of him made sales. When it came time for Koda to show his creations to evening wear buyer Marion Greenberg, the tops that had been compacted so tightly unexpectedly “popped open like a flower. It was beautiful,” he said.

“I said it was about the modular manipulation of the orthogonal.”

Greenberg, intrigued, sent him to a casual-wear buyer, who ordered up five of each piece, which he sold for $25 each. They had cost him about $2.50 to make.

He now had a dilemma. Because he was using dead stock, no more washcloths were available. Ones he found were thicker.

“It was the mid-’70s and women weren’t wearing bras. The beauty of the original washcloths was that they were thin and when you put it over the body, it was airy enough for people to think they could see through it but they really couldn’t. It was very sexy. It suggested nudity.”

He had no choice but to fill the order with the heavier cloths. Luckily, the delivery date was in the midst of Fashion Week, and all the regular buyers were out. His creations were accepted and made the windows of Henri Bendel. It was, he said, “my one fashion moment.”

It never happened again because he said the process “freaked me out.”

“I was asked to change the design, and I asked myself, ‘Do I really want to do something where other people can tell me what to do other than being totally creative?’ And then to have to source material was not for me.”

He eventually found himself with an internship at the Costume Institute working in restoration.

“To allow someone with no training to handle 19th-century garments would not be accepted today, but I was competent with my hands and they liked what I did, like re-creating the sleeve of an 18th-century English-made, painted Chinese silk dress that was missing one sleeve.”

The experience of seeing the highest achievements in costume was eye-opening. He was thrilled by a gown worn by Catherine the Great comprising solid silver- and gold-wrapped embroidered threads.

“You know thousands of hours were spent on that hand embroidery.”

Koda found a mentor in Richard Martin, curator at the Fashion Institute of Technology. In the 1980s he assisted Martin in staging such exhibits as “Balenciaga, Fashion and Surrealism,” “Jocks and Nerds” and “Halston: Absolute modernist.”

When Martin became the curator in charge at the Costume Institute in the early 1990s, he invited Koda to join him as associate curator.

IN 1997, at age 47, Koda decided to go back to school to launch a second career. Three years later he received his master’s degree in landscape architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, but he never realized his ambition.

Martin died in 1999, and the Met wanted Koda to return to head the Costume Institute, a job he had qualms about accepting.

“Martin did all the conceptual work. He was the guy doing all the interviews and talks and all the stuff I didn’t want to do. I enjoyed working behind the scenes,” he said.

Yet during his tenure Koda was responsible for raising the profile of the department when he fought for the acquisition of the Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection, which was to have gone to the F.I.T. Museum.

“I just felt a historical collection should go to an institution with the infrastructure to preserve it in perpetuity,” he said.

He also continued to stage crowd-pleasing and topical shows such as 2008’s “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” and, most recently, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” The exhibition, which closed Sept. 7 after an extended run, attracted 815,992 visitors, making it the Met’s fifth most visited show.

In 2011, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” a retrospective following the designer’s 2010 suicide, drew 661,509 visitors and, according to the museum, triggered hundreds of new memberships.

The two shows were curated by Andrew Bolton, who will succeed Koda as curator in charge.

“He’s the best curator of his generation. He has a real passion, a love of the objects, a knowledge of fashion and a conceptual approach to the material. It’s something I did in a smaller way, but he’s extraordinary,” Koda said.

Even with homes in upstate New York and Maine, Koda said he has since lost his desire to work as a landscape architect. He returns to Hawaii more frequently to visit extended family and friends. “People think it’s so weird that I still see people from high school,” he said.

Recently, while Koda was having lunch with designer Diane Von Furstenberg, she brought up his friend who died long ago, the one whose death set Koda on his path.

“I cried, and I haven’t done that in 20 years. It still hurts,” he said.

“I’ve been lucky in my life, and part of it is attitude. It’s a terrible thing to lose your closest friend at 24, but it pushed me to do something radical when I’m so conservative. Everybody has challenges or speed bumps, but you learn from it so it’s actually helpful.”