FASHION is the Rodney Dangerfield of culture. It don’t get no respect. We take unconscious cues from it; make art about it; base movies, plays and media franchises on it (some with the half life of plutonium, viz. “Sex and the City”); mine satire from it, and draw pleasure from its basic productions — that is, clothes. Yet still, fashion gives people the willies.

“Fashion makes people nervous,” Anna Wintour observes in the Vogue documentary, “The September Issue,” and on this point, as on many others about a misunderstood business, Ms. Wintour is correct.

But wait. Perhaps this is a good thing. Maybe fashion is a stealth tool of cultural critique. That would appear to be the premise underlying the art of K8 Hardy, a 31-year-old video artist, founder of the queer feminist art collective LTTR, occasional fashion stylist, creator of the cult zine FashionFashion and an inveterate shape-shifter whose first one-woman show of photographs opened this month.