"We can live without clothes but not without bread!" couturier Jean-Paul Gaultier exclaimed at the opening of his début art installation, "Pain Couture". Working from an idea by the UK-based artist Souhed Nemlaghi, Gaultier married the métier of the French baker with that of fashion's finest atelier workers - to produce haute couture using flour, water, salt and yeast.

At the Fondation Cartier, behind Venetian blinds made out of 4,000 fresh baguettes, he has unveiled a set of costumes that are delightfully sculptural, sensual and exuberant. Below, the entire basement has been transformed into a bakery, in order to replenish items as they fade. Dressed in saucy wicker corsets over their bakers' whites, its busy boulangeres flood the building with delightfully heady aromas.

Gaultier has transported the crafts of the couture house - the gathering, pleating, darting, beading and embroidery; the specialty stitching such as faufiler (basting), surfiler (whipstitch) and bâtir (temporarily binding two fabrics together) - into a comparably specialist world, where they are translated into measuring, mixing, kneading, molding, slicing, patonnage (dividing dough), fleurage (sprinkling with bran) and façonnage (shaping each loaf). Thirteen French master bakers, several British engineers and the Wandsworth baker Treolx Bendix, have contributed to the realization of this ingenious fantasy.

The range of costumes they have created together begins with a spin through French costume history. Croissants and meringues make a Marie Antoinette wig; a shimmying flapper shift consists of thin langues-de-chat; oval slices of pain de pays form a bustle that, quite literally, trails - into crumbs. Then there are Gaultier's personal homages to the bread basket (le panier): baguettes, round loaves and swelling brioches adorn or explode from within a range of silhouettes designed in wicker. There are baked versions of signature JPG items such as the kilt, the corset and the matelot shirt. Displayed in glass vitrines are pain accessories, too, including a perfectly toasted Hermes Kelly bag.

Just as one expects from a successful atelier, these pieces represent a seamless partnership of skills. Baguettes shoot out with ebullience, forming swirling skirts or flounces; rolls and country rounds pile and curl into a feminine fullness. The results include uncanny evocations of Dior's New Look, evening sheaths by Schiaparelli and sumptuous, crinolined ballgowns. The nature of these transformations - ridiculous and quixotic but also, in the end, poetic - certainly qualifies them as couture.

Subtexts and fascinating facts arise with the yeast. The catalogue bulges, for instance, with double-entendres (in English, observations such as "What nice buns the baker has!"; in French, phrases such as "to feel someone's basket", which in conversation means to pinch somebody's derriere). The show notes that, if the tools of bakers and dressmakers were intermingled, each trade would unconsciously take up the other's utensils.

Gaultier has stressed that he himself views his work as craft rather than "art". This was the reason he gave for staging "Pain Couture" instead of the fashion retrospective initially proposed by Fondation Cartier. But, for all its novelty, discovery and whimsicality, "Pain Couture" is also an extremely pragmatic undertaking. At the age of 52, Gaultier is no longer a "bad boy"; he has run his own label at a profit since '91 and last March joined the staid house of Hermes as Artistic Director.

A top-shelf saddlemaker from the 1830s, Hermes is currently one of the world's top luxury brands, particularly famous for exquisite leather goods and silks. "Pain Couture" has run during both of Gaultier's first two collections there, each of which he has used to emphasise the roots of the house. (Think corsets made like saddles, cinched in front with silver padlocks or svelte riding-jackets carefully sculpted out of shiny crocodile).

By aligning his own art with a craft that France celebrates daily, Gaultier suggests he is at heart a man of the great traditions. (This is despite his kilts, Madonna's conical bras and his role as presentor on television's "Eurotrash"). "Pain Couture" cleverly gives weight to his industry's firm contention that haute couture is a national need, as ongoingly vital to French identity as is the baguette.

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