“Choreography and creating a garment are the exact same thing,” the choreographer and dancer Celia Rowlson-Hall said recently on a break from rehearsal in Lincoln Center’s Rose Building. “You start with nothing, and then you keep building, and building, and building. And I felt like if you did those at the same time, that’s really what I wanted to see.” That’s exactly what audiences will see at Ms. Rowlson-Hall’s show this weekend, when she presents “All That Glitters Is Sold,” her ambitious amalgamation of fashion show, contemporary dance performance, and choreographed theatrical event.

The orbits of fashion and dance have crossed paths before. The most recent examples include designers such as Michael Kors, who took cues from dance in his Spring 2007 collection, and Isaac Mizrahi, Donna Karan, and Roland Mouret, who have created costumes for the work of choreographers such as Twyla Tharp, David Parsons, and the Rambert Dance Company, respectively. But the two disciplines have never shared the spotlight quite the way they do in “All That Glitters Is Sold.” The work, the product of a fellowship awarded to Ms. Rowlson-Hall by the Lincoln Center Institute, is not simply a dance piece with costumes; it is a performance that showcases commercial designs from emerging and established lines like KOOan by Kosuke Okawa, iron and love by Morgen Love, and Nico & Adrian.

The 22-year-old choreographer, a recent graduate of North Carolina School of the Arts and a working model since the age of 13, originally broached the idea as a way to unite her personal interests. “We’re in this city that obsesses over fashion more than any other city in America,” Ms. Rowlson-Hall recalled saying to fellow dancer and fashion fiend Lindsey Hornyak when the two developed the idea last summer. “And modern dance is the most misunderstood, least-paid art form there is. What happens if we put the two together?”

The result is a dance piece with polish; a fashion show with context. The six segments of the politically-charged work address topics ranging from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to the fashion industry’s emerging effort to curb anorexia-related deaths of models. Most of the designs are worn by the dancers themselves, though the delicacy of some of the garments dictate that they be worn by professional models. In a vignette that is set at a Led Zeppelin concert, for example, models wearing Mr. Okawa’s 1960s- and ’70s–inspired, primary-colored jumpsuits, cropped jackets, and bubble dresses walk and pose throughout the piece, at times interacting with the dancers through a gesture or glance. In the work’s opening section, three dancers model Nico & Adrian’s flouncy lace dresses while sending up the modeling industry itself through their grotesquely exaggerated makeup and robotic poses.

The designers involved pointed to the similarities between the art forms of fashion and dance. “When I’m thinking about presentation for an entire collection, it’s a presentation on a stage — it’s just a matter of whether it’s a stage or a runway,” Mr. Okawa, who has presented previous collections on hip-hop dancers, said.

Adrian Alicea of Nico & Adrian worked as both a runway model and a professional dancer with Doug Elkins Dance before starting his third career as a fashion designer. Mr. Alicea said he sees Ms. Rowlson-Hall’s mixed-media concept as a natural extension of elaborate, highly stylized shows by designers like Alexander McQueen, Viktor & Rolf, and Thierry Mugler.

Ms. Rowlson-Hall said that pushing those kinds of shows past their theatrical boundaries is her primary motivation. She has also worked as a freelance production assistant at Olympus Fashion Week, and she grew frustrated by the limitations she saw imposed by traditional runway shows. “There’s a story behind every clothing line,” she said. “And we would spend hours and hours getting ready for these shows that would last 10 seconds for 30 looks.”

Though the “hours and hours” of work haven’t changed, Ms. Rowlson-Hall and Ms. Hornyak, who scouted the designers and will dance in the show, are banking on the idea that their venture will have a longer run than those fleeting shows under the tents. One indication? Their business cards, which bear the term “fashion choreography,” and which Ms. Hornyak said the two originally made as a joke.

“If you Google ‘fashion choreography,’ nothing comes up,” Ms. Rowlson-Hall explained. “And that’s why I was like, Lindsey, we just might be on to something. It’s not like ‘dancer,’ where there’s 8 million of us in this city. Or ‘actor.’ Or ‘designer.’ ‘Fashion choreographers not there.

Well, now it is.