It's all about freedom

Julia Flesher Koch, a young woman of manners and social ambition from Conway, Ark., much admired in her Upper East Side circle for marrying one of the richest men in America, made her New York society debut last month when she ascended the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an explosion of flashbulbs and expectations. It was what the Met calls ''the party of the year,'' the annual benefit for its Costume Institute, and Julia Koch, 34, a former Adolfo assistant who literally dressed Nancy Reagan in the old court designer's knitted suits, was co-chairwoman -- a position held in the past by both Pat Buckley and Jacqueline Onassis.

Koch (pronounced coke) shared her post with two crucial members of the fashion trade: Patrick McCarthy, the chairman of Fairchild Publications, and Anna Wintour, Vogue's editor, who handpicked her for the job. Koch's husband of 18 months, David H. Koch, executive vice president of the $30 billion Koch Industries Inc., the second-largest privately held company in the United States, was helpful, too: he has given the Met, by his estimation, $3 million. In 1995, he paid $9.5 million for the Fifth Avenue apartment that belonged to Jackie Onassis. The couple plans to move in this spring.

Such were the circumstances that propelled Julia Koch upward toward the Met's over-the-top tribute to the late Gianni Versace. Anyone in the crowd, from Katharine Graham to Madonna to Sting, might have considered her superbly prepared for the evening ahead. And yet, it was not an easy performance for Koch. She looked dazed, like a gazelle caught in the strobe lights.

''She was a nervous Nellie in the car on the way over,'' David Koch, 57, said later. Perhaps in her eagerness to make a mark at a party of 900 peacocks, Koch had abandoned her beige-and-chocolate minimalist taste for heavy eye shadow, enormous lashes, upswept hair with cascading ringlets and a $25,000 black silk Versace with draping over the right breast. Looking like something out of a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic, she managed a few television interviews on the way up, but seemed no less high-strung when she made it through the

Met's front door. There she whispered to her husband, who responded with a reassuring hand on her back.

''You're doing great,'' he said.

Then he nudged her into the crowd.

The arrival of Julia Koch in New York is a story as new as Sting's performance for Versace at the Met and as old as Edith Wharton. Women of every era have social ambition, and society will always need new blood. Today, in the booming but cautious late 1990's, there is a perceived vacuum -- a dearth of people willing, able and perhaps foolish enough to carry on. Certainly Brooke Astor, at 95, can look down from Valhalla and see a landscape of uneven terrain.