Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week kicks off tomorrow, and this season will be marked by the ever-increasing overlap between fashion and art. Bloomingdale’s is launching its 16-week campaign “Artrageous,” a collaboration with the New Museum of Contemporary Art that pairs clothing with the work of visual artists in the store’s Lexington Avenue windows. Later this week, Levi’s will present a denim collection that represents a collaboration between the brand, the British artist Damien Hirst, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

From Louis Vuitton placing Olafur Eliasson’s sculptures in its holiday windows last year to Carolina Herrera finding inspiration in the work of Edvard Munch, fashion and art are finding plenty of ways to benefit from each other. But are they benefiting equally?

Fashion once granted a degree of chic to the art world, formerly a cloistered, high-brow scene. But, at least in New York, the roles have shifted. The contemporary art world is now burgeoning in a way that makes its offerings widely accessible. Fashion, by contrast, has become a game for the elite. When the two come together, art lends fashion a sense of relevancy — not the other way around.

This may seem counterintuitive, given hoards of shoppers at H & M and Zara, as well as the preponderance of fashion advertisements. But the prevalence of fast fashion and media buys doesn’t necessarily translate to a greater understanding or acceptance of style. If dressing with some connection to the fashion industry were a part of everyday life, New York would be a much better dressed city. If style were so easy to come by, celebrities would be able to dress themselves — instead of relying on stylists. Nor would television audiences have to take guidance from shows such as “What Not to Wear.” Even on the higher end, if the fashion magazines were succeeding at dictating style, Vogue magazine wouldn’t have to pose the question, as it does in an article in the September issue, “Why are women so afraid of dressing up?”

Meanwhile, museums and galleries are the place to be, so much so that the art world is practically taking over this city. With the move of the New Museum to the Bowery from SoHo, the Lower East Side has become a red-hot center for galleries, with Eleven Rivington, Salon 94 Freemans, Rental Gallery, and Smith-Stewart moving in. Uptown, the Seventh Regiment Armory, on the Upper East Side, is being renovated into a contemporary art space. Marlborough Chelsea is expanding to a 10,000-square-foot space in the Chelsea Arts Tower. Even the performing arts got in on the act: the Metropolitan Opera opened the Schwartz Gallery Met last fall.

Growth can be seen on the museum circuit, too: The Whitney Museum plans to expand to a space near the High Line; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its new Greek and Roman galleries, will present expanded space for 19th Century European paintings and sculpture, as well as a new gallery for Native North American art, by year’s end, and of course, the Museum of Modern Art’s new building is attracting so many visitors that locals can barely squeeze in. Not only that, museums have figured out how to boost attendance: Free parties and events encourage new audiences to pass through the doors.

Outside white walls, auctions have become as talked about and as closely watched as sporting events — with new records being set each season. But even auctions are seeing competition from the growing power and proliferation of major art fairs. This November, New York will host the Asian Contemporary Art Fair, the city’s first fair devoted to this newly popular category of art.

So art is hot. And the fashion industry wants some of the heat. So naturally Levi’s wants to work with a controversial, name brand artist like Damien Hirst. And it’s to Bloomingdale’s advantage to hang paintings in its windows and draw connections between artists and designers. As Bloomingdale’s vice president and fashion director Stephanie Solomon said of the “Artrageous” promotion: “It’s a more interesting campaign that brings a new customer into Bloomingdale’s.”

The retailer asked some of its top designers for suggestions on whom they’d like to collaborate with. Marc Jacobs, whose coats and dresses adorn mannequins in the current windows, chose the Belgian artist Jean-Claude Wouters, whose experimental photography hangs behind the mannequins. “Wouters’s work has a real calmness. Marc Jacobs really has that in his sensibility, too,” Ms. Solomon said.

Also on display now is work by Ivana Omazic for Celine paired with the colorful photography of Mika Ninagawa. This pairing goes deeper: Ms. Omazic had Ms. Ninagawa’s photographs printed on fabric that was then used to create several pieces in Celine’s fall 2007 collection.

Upcoming artists include Jason Hackenwerth, who uses balloons to create installations, to be paired with a group of designers, and Stephen Posen, whose work will be featured with designs by his son, Zac Posen.

If the art market keeps roaring along the way it has, fashion is likely to continue to ride the art wagon — in consistently new and unusual ways. Which is all to the good. If it brings attention to both sides, so much the better. Besides, if fashion were such an innate part of our culture that it needed no vehicle to latch onto, we’d be French.