Silver-plated shoes in pairs on the floor. Spectral figures, dressed in white, lying on gurneys in an operating theater. Row after row of identically clad schoolboys, standing at attention behind identical desks. For years, the fashion designer Thom Browne has treated industry insiders to presentations that look more like art installations than like a typical runway show. This March, when the exhibition “Thom Browne Selects” opens at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on Fifth Avenue, ordinary civilians will finally get to experience Mr. Browne’s theatrical sensibility firsthand.

Like other prominent designers, artists and architects who have been invited to participate in Cooper Hewitt’s continuing Selects series, Mr. Browne was given the run of the museum’s collection to mine for his own purposes. As a fashion designer, he might have been expected to geek out on the 27,000 textiles in the museum’s collection, some dating back 2,400 years. Instead, poring over its holdings last summer, he chose mirrors and frames. So, when “Thom Browne Selects” opens on March 4, visitors will end up looking at themselves — all the more so, since the walls and floor will be covered in holographic wallpaper in a reflective silver diamond pattern. This will be quite a departure for the museum, “almost an hallucinogenic experience,” said Matilda McQuaid, the deputy curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, who has worked closely with Mr. Browne on the exhibition.

“The thing for me was to do something that brought my world into Cooper Hewitt,” Mr. Browne, 50, said in a telephone interview. “For the past couple of seasons, I’ve been interested in mirrors and reflections and the idea of uniformity, so it worked out almost perfectly.”

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The idea of uniforms comes up repeatedly in Mr. Browne’s work, which resonates with the tension between individuality and conformity. Known for his gray flannel suits, traditional tailoring, constricted designs and strangely high-hemmed trousers, he is at once conservative and flamboyant.

“His whole approach — in a funny way, it’s Tim Burton meets Pierre Balmain,” said David Revere McFadden, the chief curator emeritus of the Museum of Arts and Design, referring to the film director and the Paris couturier who created flight attendants’ uniforms for TWA in the mid-1960s. There are “interesting echoes” of those uniforms in Mr. Browne’s work, added Mr. McFadden, who was the curator of decorative arts from 1978 to 1995 at the Cooper Hewitt, but at least Mr. Browne’s designs do not require girdles.

Among the objects Mr. Browne selected for the exhibition are gilded frames from 18th-century France, silvered frames by the Art Nouveau architect Hector Guimard, and a hand mirror from the Wiener Werkstätte, the early-20th-century Austrian art and design movement. There are a number of mirrors from Georgian and Edwardian England. Perhaps the most curious is a large gilded mirror fashioned in the mid-1970s by Jim Dine, the celebrated Pop artist.

Commissioned as part of a series by Phyllis Lambert, the architect and Seagram heiress, for her art-infused renovation of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, the Dine mirror is decorated with plaster casts of construction tools, among them a pair of shears and a hatchet. Guests were taken aback: “Try sleeping with that over your head,” a visiting pharmaceuticals executive told The Los Angeles Times after the hotel was sold in 1984. The mirror found its way to the Cooper Hewitt not long after — hatchet and all.

In any case, individual objects are not the point. “It’s an immersive environment,” Mr. Browne said. “Each object is important, but for me, I like it to be a total experience. I do the same thing with my shows. Of course, I want people to appreciate each piece, but the overall image is initially what I want people to be hit with.”

The Cooper Hewitt experience will include not only the reflective wallpaper, donated for the occasion by the London fabric firm Osborne & Little, but also several items from Mr. Browne’s studio, among them 60 pairs of silver-plated Thom Browne brogues and a vintage silver-plated Steelcase desk that weighs in at 400 pounds. The whole of it will be presented in a room-within-a-room to be constructed in the museum’s Marks Gallery, as the rather froufrou music room of this 1902 Andrew Carnegie mansion is now known.

Like a period room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art down the street, the gallery will have a barrier to prevent visitors from venturing more than a few feet inside — not that anyone is likely to mistake this for something out of an old house. “I want it to be a very timeless world,” Mr. Browne said. “The mirrors are from so many different periods, the desk is from midcentury, the wallpaper is very now.” And then there are the shoes, which will be lined up on the floor with military precision.

The choice of Mr. Browne as a guest curator should not be a great surprise. He won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for 2012; Michelle Obama wore an outfit he’d designed for her to the 2013 Presidential Inauguration. It probably didn’t hurt that Thom Browne International will augment the customary endowment from the Marks Family Foundation by underwriting the elaborate installation, which will require wall and floor reinforcements. Though frowned upon by some, the idea of partly self-financed shows is not new and has sometimes yielded critically acclaimed exhibitions, like the Met’s 2011 “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” which was organized by Mr. Browne’s companion, Andrew Bolton, now the curator in charge of the Met’s Costume Institute.

To anyone who has witnessed Mr. Browne’s fashion displays, “Thom Browne Selects” will seem somewhat familiar. A midcentury Steelcase desk and silver-plated brogues were featured in a Browne installation last fall at Le Bon Marché, the chic Paris department store. Called “Officeman 2,” it was set in a completely mirrored room. “The Officeman,” Mr. Browne’s men’s wear show for last summer’s New York Fashion Week, used a dizzying infinity of mirrors to deliver a similarly kaleidoscopic effect.

As with the fashion shows, there will be a strong narrative aspect to the Cooper Hewitt installation. The question is whose narrative it will be. “Because there are mirrors, it can be a personal story for each person who sees it,” Mr. Browne maintained. Still, Mr. Browne’s own narrative will probably be dominant.

The key to that story is Mr. Browne’s upbringing in Allentown, Pa. The son of lawyers who invariably reported to their offices in suits, he grew up with all the trappings of conservative Middle America. His mother even silver-plated his baby shoes — an act Mr. Browne, in his own personal “Citizen Kane,” has imbued with near-Rosebud import.

Fashion, in this narrative, is relegated to second place. “I think fashion becomes not very interesting, because everybody thinks it has to change, as opposed to evolve,” he said. Uniforms, on the other hand, are very interesting to him. “There’s something so confident in almost adopting a uniform for yourself,” Mr. Browne said. “It frees yourself to think about things that are possibly more important than fashion.” And so, in Mr. Browne’s world, uniformity encourages individuality — an idea visitors might want to think about as they catch their reflections in his mirror-filled room.

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