The meeting of high fashion and art has always been a bit of a problematic idea. They are connected social worlds, alike in so many ways – not least when it comes to their sense of self-importance – but it's never been clear whether art and fashion really mix.

In the exhibition Feel & Think: A New Era in Tokyo Fashion, the organisers and curators go a long way to try to get you to consider that question. The show is collaboration between the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and the National Art School and features installation art works by five Tokyo-based fashion brands who go under a bewildering array of upper and lowercase neologisms including ANREALAGE, mintdesigns, SASQUATCHfabrix, THEATRE PRODUCTS and writtenafterwards.

The Sydney iteration of the show, originally curated and staged at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, comes under the imprimatur of Dr. Gene Sherman whose SCAF has been responsible for some highly credible and foreword-thinking exhibitions by international artists. And there are a series of fashion-related events tied to the show, and a very impressive clothbound catalogue/book with a fire engine red cover and many pages with pictures of fabric close-ups, giving the whole thing the vibe of a serious contemporary art show.

Fashion is like art, argues Sherman, in her introduction to this catalogue. It is but one of society's many cultural manifestations and can be analysed and decrypted, perhaps by experts using semiotics, or by laypeople who know what they like, using their taste and discernment. Of course a lot of inflated claims get made for art, so the proof is in the pudding of the actual installations.

In the NAS Gallery the first thing you see is a life-size sculpture of a bull by SASQUATCHfabrix that is made from leather jackets. The installations don't have titles, just the name of the design houses, but it's fairly easy to discern what is being said: leather comes from somewhere. In this case, a bull. Next up is a room by writtenafterwards that features a naked mannequin looking through a window into an adjoining room where machinery appears to be operated by a series of adorable stuffed animals – rabbits, hens, foxes – who produce bundles of cash. The none-too-subtle message here is that fashion exploits non-humans, ie, factory workers, to make money for airhead fashion slaves who are, after all, as naked as the king.

Upstairs at the NAS Gallery, THEATRE PRODUCTS present a little hut complete with cash register and couture garments with barcodes attached. When the visitor swipes these labels with a handheld reader, a signal is sent to a data projector that plays a pleasing melody with barcode graphics in soothing colours. In the middle of the room is a massive installation of shredded fashion magazines that serve as a bed for an array of mannequins. Wideshortslimlong, the title of ANREALAGE's artwork, more-or-less describes the visual distortion created by the very wide, or very tall and skinny, mannequins set up in facsimiles of a shop floor.

As to what these three installations might be about I'm not sure. The musical-swiper work is perhaps saying commerce is music to their ears, but as to the other two, all I can say is that when I looked away from the art, nothing remained. It was a pleasing visual experience that evaporated the second I stopped thinking about it.

The more interesting question that is raised by the exhibition is how art and commercial branding go together. It's the art world's greatest ideological battlefield, with those who believe that art means something spiritual and political attempting to resist the seductive forces that commodify art into mere product. By placing brands in an art gallery, the curators are asking that fashion be taken seriously as a form of cultural communication. But rather than doing so on its own terms, here fashion becomes a faint and absurd reflection of contemporary art, aping its style without its content.

Perhaps I'm overthinking it. With nothing more than nine years of watching various versions of Project Runway (US, Australia, Allstar) I admit I remain a fashion neophyte – but I wonder if the visual puns and forced playfulness of the installations in Feel & Think is enough to justify putting fashion brands in a gallery. Fashion has the potential to be provocative and fun, stylish and elegant, aspirational and fantastic, but when a frock gets put on a mannequin in an art gallery, its potential dies. That's because fashion can exist in the world in a way that contemporary art can only dream of. So if fashion and art can mix, it's probably only through the garb of those attending galleries, rather than the work on show inside them. Feel me?