Lately, the romance between fashion and art seems to be taking a more serious turn.Earlier this year Christopher Baileys exhibition in Burberrys pop-up Makers House immersed us – and his latest collection – in the art and studio of Henry Moore, with the help of major sculptures, maquettes and personal ephemera loaned from the Henry Moore Foundation.Then last summer there was Duro Olowous memorable curated show revolving around art, textiles and much more at Camden Art Centre.

Now the latest fashion designer to turn curator is JW Anderson, whose Disobedient Bodies,opened at Hepworth Wakefield last week and runs until June 18.The show consists of a rich and wonderfully idiosyncratic selection both from the Wakefields Modern British holdings as well as Andersons own extensive collections of art, fashion and design– along with some eclectic outside loans.

The exhibits range from sculptures by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and recent Turner nominee Anthea Hamilton through bulbous contemporary ceramics by Magdalene Odundo to vintage couture by Christian Dior and Madame Grés.There are also conceptual classics by Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons, chairs by Gaetano Pesce and Gerrit Rietveld and a film of Martha Graham performing her 1935 Lamentation, in which she creates shapes from inside a tube of fabric.

But the starting point for Anderson was the outrageously radical reinterpretations of the human form in the early works of Moore and Hepworth.“I was struck by how rebellious they were, and how shocking it must have been, ” Anderson says.He has put gender subversion at the centre of his work and also owns work by Ben Nicholson and Keith Vaughan as well as a major collection of studio ceramics.“In my own work I try and look at how ugliness could be new and how to work through that.”

Certainly there are many unexpected conversations, as well as some surprising connections in the bodily investigations running through this most gregarious of exhibitions.It has been deliberately devised by Anderson (in association with the firm 6a architects) to give the feeling of “an intimate social gathering in someones home,” with the Hepworths Galleries divided into a series of columns and chambers using curtains of pleated white muslin and fabric from Andersons archive.

Here, encounters include some of Andersons vividly androgynous knits holding hands across from Sarah Lucass languid looping bunnies and a Comme des Garçons Monstercardigan tying itself in knots before aparticularly kinky Hans Bellmer doll.In another space the thrust of a Dior dress echoes the bump of a Jean Arp marble, and Albert Giacomettis Standing Woman and totemic bronzes by Hepworth and Louise Bourgeois loom before a wall of dangling Helmut Lang harnesses.

And its not just the art world that has been invited to this party.In an inspired variant on the usually tokenistic (and tedious) institutional education projects,kids from local schools have been invited to dress up in in some of the most precious pieces of couture.The pictures of the little darlings resplendent in vintage Comme, Issey Miyake and Elisabeth de Senneville taken by leading fashion photographer and long-term Anderson collaborator Jamie Hawkesworth form an intrinsic part of the show.

Throughout and where possible, in homage to Hepworths desire that visitors experience her sculpture with their hands as well as their eyes, visitors of all ages are encouraged to physically engage with many of the exhibits.We are invited to sit on several of the classic chairs by Eileen Gray, Gerrit Rietveld and Gaetano Pesce and to get up close and personal with the forest of giant dangling JW Anderson jumpers which hang in the same room as the photographs of the children.

“Ultimately clothing is to be worn, there is a physicality to it and thats what I want people to feel – the colour and the motion.” says Anderson, who also stresses that “Im not here to give anyone a history lesson… these are just objects that send me crazy.”Disobedient Bodies:JW Anderson curates the Hepworth Wakefield is on at The Hepworth Wakefield, Gallery Walk Wakefield, West Yorkshire WF1 5AWuntil June 18