New York City Ballet’s gala on Thursday night managed to do disservices to both ballet and fashion. Three dances were presented with new costumes by the fashion designer Valentino, as was a world premiere; a Balanchine ballet was performed with its three lead roles redistributed among eight dancers; and Valentino was honored in film and, finally, onstage. This should have amounted to something substantial. The proceedings, however, kept suggesting that couture and ballet have less in common than we might hope.


Worse, they kept trivializing both genres. An evening of froth would have been fine. Froth has bubbles. Thursday’s gala didn’t even have those.


City Ballet’s 2012-13 season should be historic for Peter Martins, its ballet master in chief; this is his 30th year at the helm. He could at least have given a little weight to Thursday’s gala by pointing out that it drew together threads from the main features of this year’s programming.


“Rubies” (1967), the evening’s Balanchine ballet, is to music by Stravinsky, and thus belongs to the current fall season’s celebration of the extraordinarily long and rich Balanchine-Stravinsky partnership.


“Bal de Couture,” the world premiere by Mr. Martins himself, is to Tchaikovsky music and will join the repertory on Jan. 24 as part of the winter season’s Tschaikovsky Celebration. And the first three short dances, two by Mr. Martins and one by Christopher Wheeldon, are to American music, anticipating the American music theme that will pervade the April to June repertory.


One of Mr. Martins’s chief directorial devices is to add a gimmick to both galas and seasons. The 1972 vodka toast by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein to the dead Stravinsky; the connection of dance and architecture; the company’s treasuries of ballets by Balanchine and Robbins: these and others have become ploys over the years. I don’t mind gimmicks: Balanchine took up jewels as a gimmick and turned them into “Jewels,” the three-part plotless ballet triptych (with “Rubies” as its centerpiece) that now enriches repertories across the world.


But the women’s attire for “Bal de Couture” was mainly wretched, in theatrical terms. Six of the women wore black-and-white gowns, against which ribboned point shoes of either shocking pink or vermilion made feet and ankles look bizarrely bright and huge; three other women wore puffball tutus (one black, one white, one scarlet) that seemed keener to disguise than to exhibit their figures.


And the coiffures, each individual, were almost all grotesque, with vast, isolated curls and quiffs. Some women wore scarlet petticoats, but when ballet legwork opened them up to view, they lost the fun that they would have had when glimpsed in more ordinary social dancing.


These were anti-ballet designs, but you can forgive Valentino: he’s inexperienced in ballet. The men, in modern black suits with ties and white shirts, looked entirely elegant — they belonged to a far less deranged world than the women.


To forgive Mr. Martins for — once again — squandering his dancers, though, is harder. “Bal de Couture” featured no fewer than 10 of the company’s female principals, and 9 of the company’s male principals, with the rising soloist Chase Finlay. Yet almost all its roles, largely danced to polonaise and waltz music from Tchaikovsky’s opera “Eugene Onegin,” could have been danced equally effectively by members of the corps de ballet.


As my companion remarked, the motto seemed to be “We wouldn’t dream of distorting your creations by actually dancing in them, Mr. Valentino!” This isn’t the literal truth, but it’s how it felt, because the choreography was more interested in showing off the costumes than the dancers.