The obese benefits supervisor painted by Lucian Freud may have brought a higher price at last week’s Christie’s auction, but it was Andy Warhol’s “Double Marlon” that got its own send-off party.

Intended to create presale buzz, the party was held in the penthouse at the Soho Grand Hotel and was filled with people from the fashion world: the supermodels Agyness Deyn and Anouck Lepère; designers Derek Lam and Thom Browne; the fur heir Gilles Mendel, and scores of other assorted stylists, models, and model look-alikes, who lounged on beds as though posing for a shoot. There were also names from television and film: Dennis Hopper co-hosted, and young actresses Rumer Willis and Leven Rambin made appearances.

It was fitting to bring the fashion, art, and Hollywood crowds together for the “Double Marlon” party. After all, it was Warhol who discovered how much cultivating ties with Hollywood and fashion could advance both an individual artist’s career and the prestige of the art scene in general. For years, the magazine he founded, Interview, has covered the intersection of these worlds.

Today, the art world is again embracing fashion. Auction houses are selling contemporary fashion pieces, or using links to fashion to help promote their sales. Curators are drawing connections between fashion and sculpture and installation art. And in no medium do fashion and art overlap as thoroughly as in photography. Many fine art photographers also work as fashion photographers, and vice versa. It is likely photography’s association with fashion (and advertising) that, along with price, accounts for its popularity among collectors.

Phillips de Pury recently began including specially commissioned, one-off fashion designs in its Saturday@Phillips sales, which already include vintage furniture and jewelry. An April 26 sale included 30 pieces commissioned from Leana Zuniga, of the label Electric Feathers. (The auction also coincidentally included a vintage dress, designed by Warhol himself, in a print featuring Campbell’s Soup cans.) Twenty of the pieces sold, with the most expensive, the handmade brass chain vest, bringing $938 with buyer’s premium.

This summer, Phillips will take its alliance with fashion a step further, selling 96-by-72-inch larger-than-life images of the supermodels Kate Moss, Amber Valletta, and Natalia Vodianova as part of a London-based exhibition of work by the fashion photographer Mario Testino.

A British theater director, Jules Wright, began working frequently with fashion designers after she took over a former power station and turned it into an arts center, called the Wapping Project. In 2005, for an exhibition called “Fashion, Film, and Fiction,” she commissioned 28 fashion designers, shoemakers, and milliners to create pieces in response to the building. One of the pieces, the Alice in Wonderland World War II parachute dress by Robert Carey Williams, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

More recently, Ms. Wright has done projects that draw on the intersection of fashion, art, theater, and film. For an exhibition called “Free and Framed,” the photographer Thomas Zanon-Larcher did a serious of 10 photographs backstage at fashion shows. He also did a series of staged images — resembling film stills from a nonexistent film — representing a contemporary retelling of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” In each still, the model playing Nora was dressed by a different British designer. (Warhol, too, recognized the possibilities for artists in appropriating the motif of the film still — like the image of Marlon Brando astride a motorcycle, from the 1953 movie “The Wild One,” that is the basis for “Double Marlon.”)

In an interview, Ms. Wright said she saw fashion as overlapping with sculpture and installation. “When you start to work with people like [John] Galliano and Yohji Yamamoto, you’re dealing with sculpture, and often pieces that are very rarely worn,” she said.

In the marriage of art and fashion, each side clearly gains something. The art world — where the major collectors and philanthropists are often older and not particularly hip — gets to borrow the youth and edge of the fashion scene. Meanwhile, fashion gets to assume more weight and seriousness.

For auction houses, in particular, the benefits of highlighting ties to the fashion world do not go directly to the bottom line. As an observer pointed out at the Christie’s party, none of the guests seemed likely to be bidders at Christie’s sale, where “Double Marlon” sold for $32.5 million, including Christie’s commission.

Instead, like much of the auction houses’ marketing, the party was less about selling a painting than about promoting the Christie’s brand. And in that sense, the worlds of fashion and art have much in common.