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It’s hard to tear your eyes away from Leigh Bowery’s pink sequined codpiece, just one of the many sumptuous objects in the cabinet of curiosities that is V&A East, the new museum in London’s Olympic Park. But the idea of radical tailoring underpins this whole building, which exudes an explicit haute couture vibe. For Dublin-based architects O’Donnell + Tuomey, it all started with a sleeve in a Vermeer painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland. “I was trying to work with the folds,” says John Tuomey, “which became the first iteration of the building. I started thinking about the fabric that clothes you, the body that’s sheltered, but also the space in between.”

Ideas of draping and concealment were also sparked by the work of Spanish couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga, the subject of a 2017 V&A retrospective. As part of that exhibition, ghostly X-ray images, at once beautiful and forensic, revealed details not visible to the naked eye, such as boning, hoops and dress weights, which determined the precise fall of fabric and shape of garments.

Tuomey compares the V+A East’s design to a protective jacket, a kind of futuristic outerwear. “We hollowed out spaces, so when the public sees the shape on the outside, they can sense the shape on the inside, before they enter.”

What the public sees is a pavilion in the round, immaculately folded and faceted like a giant piece of origami or an angular circus tent, standing in such a way, says Tuomey, “that it looks like it’s inviting people to pour in through the tent flaps”. The tent/jacket is tailored from chunky precast concrete panels, the colour of warm honey. “We wanted it to be pigmented so as not to be reminiscent of industrial grey concrete,” he adds. “We wanted it to feel like it was formed out of stuff of the earth.” Each precast section was carefully calibrated to exacting tolerances, then craned in and slotted together, like a 3D jigsaw, supported by a steel structure, the Balenciaga boning underneath it all.

There is something of the circus – rollicking, colourful and hucksterish – about the post-Olympic terraforming of the Lower Lea Valley between Stratford and Hackney Wick, for centuries a place of sullen and sometimes surreal industry (people still talk of the Carpenters Road fridge mountain), until the 2012 Games bestowed that transformational fairy dust.

Underscoring the urban refashioning was the idea of an “Olympicopolis”, a cultural quarter patterned on the Albertopolis, named after Queen Victoria’s consort and driving force behind the Great Exhibition of 1851. As the world’s first cultural district, the west London Albertopolis encompassed a group of institutions around South Kensington, including the V&A mothership, first founded by Henry Cole as the more prosaic Museum of Manufactures, devoted to the applied arts.

In expanding eastwards, the V&A joins outposts of the BBC, London College of Fashion and Sadler’s Wells (also designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey), ranged along a waterfront site, each a statement building unto itself, like slightly uneasy guests at a cocktail party. Farther afield are a new campus for University College London, and the V&A’s East Storehouse, a walk-in wunderkammer the size of an aircraft hangar containing half a million objects, which opened last year to awe and acclaim. Now collectively known as the East Bank – after the South Bank, with its pioneering postwar venues for art, theatre and music – this constellation of culture and education brings a new kind of industry to east London, cementing and intensifying creative relationships with local communities and shifting the capital’s centre of gravity eastwards.

“As soon as you’re inside, you should feel as though you have the whole building at your disposal,” says Tuomey. The five-storey creation is an armature for activity and encounter, its gallery spaces flexing and fluxing with a dazzle of changing displays, its main staircase cranked like a German expressionist film set, where people can sit and hang out, its rooftop terrace a window on the world offering new views of old London to the west.

“I like to imagine people looking down at the square,” says Tuomey. “They might have in their mind a kind of double-image of themselves, being on the terrace and down in the square, as if they have mentally mapped their journey up.” En route, there are conspiratorial glimpses out to East Bank neighbours, along with the commercial colossus of Westfield and the wider Olympic Park, connecting visitors with their still evolving locale.

Amplifying the institutional quest to demystify and democratise its historic collections, the V&A East delves into the art, culture and politics of making, teleporting Henry Cole’s Museum of Manufactures into the 21st century. Two permanent galleries headlined Why We Make will offer topical and subversive perspectives on the museum’s vast collections, juxtaposing practitioners and disciplines in deliciously unholy alliances.

“It’s an approach that enables us to draw from geographies, chronologies and media,” says V&A East project director Jen McLachlan. “Each section is populated with multiple objects that haven’t been brought together before to spark new dialogues around a particular theme.”

So Leigh Bowery’s pink sequined codpiece forms part of a glittering “his and hers” ensemble designed by Bowery and corset-maker Mr Pearl, for a 1987 ballet Because We Must, choreographed by Michael Clark. The kaleidoscopic costumes are paired with an impromptu video of the ballet, contextualising the objects but also giving a sense of how gorgeously outrageous and countercultural the 1980s really were, in a pre-digital age when everything was perforce made by hand. Bowery, who died in 1994 after searing like a comet through London’s demi-monde, would probably never have imagined his codpiece would end up in a museum. A national treasure, indeed.

It’s a world away from dusty cabinets. In fact, the cabinets and display systems are compelling objects in themselves, designed by Jayden Ali of JA Projects, with artist Larry Achiampong and graphic designers A Practice for Everyday Life. “They’re inspired by how people display things in markets and high streets, which are so important to London,” explains Ali.

Showcases with illuminated fascias echo shopfronts, cabinetry is crafted from salvaged London plane trees and assemblages of fashion, textiles and ceramics echo how goods are arrayed in local markets and stores. The V&A East Youth Collective devised bespoke typography and illuminated signage, channelling the city’s electric nightscape to guide visitors through the building. Interiors are simple, airy white spaces, with robust terrazzo floors, designed not to compete with the visual exuberance of the objects on show.

Although the permanent galleries will regularly rotate their displays, the museum will also host a programme of temporary exhibitions, with an inaugural show examining the history and impact of Black British music. And beyond the formal confines of the galleries, a series of creative commissions and live events will platform the people and ideas shaping culture, as well as exploring new ideas for creativity, with artworks displayed across the V&A East’s two sites.

The scene is set by a specially commissioned sculpture on the waterfront promenade. A Place Beyond, by Thomas J Price, shows a fictionalised young everywoman, mobile phone in hand, scanning the horizon. Five metres tall, but somehow in perfect synchronicity with O’Donnell + Tuomey’s building, it’s Price’s tallest sculpture to date, constructed in bronze.

Price recalls being taken to the South Kensington V&A as a child, which shaped his critique of narratives around “classical” sculpture and museum collections. “I want this sculpture to become an extension of the people who inhabit the museum,” he says, “and the spaces around it.” In some ways, it’s emblematic of the convulsive change wrought – and still being wrought – across this part of east London. When Price was discovering the old V&A, the site of this new V&A would have been tangled industrial acres as far as the eye could see, with culture the last thing on anyone’s mind. And now look at it.