Exhibition Wed-Mon Aug 27-Sept 1, Olympic Room

Storefront exhibition Sept 8-Oct 5, throughout the city

Fashion is content. This is my own answer to the question posed by curator Rhonda Howard, who asked 22 artists to fill in the blank in the sentence, "Fashion is _________." The answers, which eventually resulted in work compiled into an exhibition (with fashion show), are as various as they are unexpected: as sensible as "Fashion is form," as oracular as "Fashion is heavy accessories," and as unexpected as "Fashion is a glamblaster."

When I say fashion is content, I mean that fashion has meaning, and that's why Howard's show, curated under the auspices of her nonprofit organization THREAD for ART, returns to round, vivid life what the recent Bellevue Art Museum fashion exhibition sadly deflated. The artists in Fashion Is Art have isolated the issues that lurk at the margins of wearing and have taken them to glorious extremes--issues such as necessity, expression, trendiness, and personal control. By using the "fashion can be art" assertion as a platform to launch from rather than a proof to labor under, the show sidesteps the dreary arguments about what does and doesn't get to be dignified under the rubric of art, and catapults the idea into a realm both fabulous and thoughtful.

For instance. The Northern California duo Airpocket (Dylan Bolles and Nathan Lynch) wonder, through a series of nutty performances, whether they can get the motorcycle helmet to catch on as a fashion accessory the way that other functional clothing (the steel-toed boot, camouflage, bowling shoes) has; while ridiculous and slapstick, their on-location stunts pick up an echo of society's obsession with safety. Will censorious protect-us-from-ourselves laws eventually lead us in such a direction? (Leslie Clague's fiberglass safety vest suggests that they will.) And who's to say what will seem kicky and debonair in the future?

There are themes that bounce and resonate through the collection. One is the barrier between public and private space--a space which your clothes uneasily delineate. Sami Ben Larbi's inflatable suit posits a kind of greedy self-sufficiency, whereby if you need more "personal space," you just inflate yourself in order to acquire it. (Or, if you need a place to sit, you simply inflate your pants.) Julie Johnson, on the other hand, offers portable solitude in an opaque full-head helmet--instant privacy in a public space, if you can bear it.

What is thrilling about Fashion Is Art is the way the artists' usual work is bent and tested by a complex, intricate idea--but still seems entirely to belong to each artist's realm. There are dresses made of recycled materials by Michelle Kumata, who designs costumes for the Degenerate Art Ensemble. There are deep-fried underpants made by Toi Sennhauser, whose performances over the past couple of years have often integrated food and her own body--milk poured over her legs, strawberry jam dripped, in agonizing slowness, over her thumb. This seems to me not to violate a taboo, but to create a delightful new one--who wouldn't love to be seen walking down the street nibbling on some panties? (Who indeed.) Yuki Nakamura, who, with Claudia Fitch, first proposed the idea of a fashion and art show to THREAD for ART, has transformed one of her boxlike sculptures into a regally tiered gown, suggesting, rather saucily, a destination.

Several artists look at the way we inhabit our clothes rather than wear them. (Elizabeth Jameson has been trafficking in the symbolic weight of clothing for years--here she's showing a three-person dress frame, an elegant cage tying the wearers together.) Others take on the idea of the uniform, of the encompassing trend that doesn't individualize as much as make the wearer disappear. And there is the question of context, of where something is being worn: Susan Robb's inflatable outdoors accessories look at our ambivalent, aggressive relationship to our environment, at how in order to go out into nature and enjoy it, we feel we have to protect ourselves from it first.

Control, constraint, taboo, masking, titillation, making external what is internal, and hiding what is obvious--this is a rich terrain for art to explore. After Bumbershoot, the work in Fashion Is Art will be placed in storefronts all over town, the better to tweak our everyday lives, the more so for being placed next to the real commercial thing. Here is the right dialogue for fashion and art: contradictory, gorgeous, absurd, out in the world.

emily@thestranger.com