NEW YORK—At the Jewish Museum in New York on a recent Thursday night, models dressed in corsets made from parchment and skirts fashioned from dark velvet trounced, barefoot, through the museum’s Scheuer Auditorium. They were modeling designer Levi Okunov’s latest collection, inspired by Torah crowns, scrolls, and other ritual objects from the museum’s permanent collection. The show marked the close of "Off the Wall: Artists at Work," a two-week series of exhibitions and open studios by performance and video artists, DJs, and others working on Jewish themes in nontraditional realms.

At 22, Okunov has already showed previous collections elsewhere in New York, including the trendy downtown restaurant Café DeVille and the Frying Pan, a ship moored at Pier 63 and used as an event space. But Okunov’s fashion show was a first for the museum, which had never hosted anything like it before. Models strutted to a throbbing remix of Madonna and Israeli pop star Ofra Haza with videos by artist Melissa Shiff, showing spinning mandalas made from God’s name, projected behind them. If the event was any indication, alternative expressions of Judaism through art, although still emerging, may become one of the more vibrant cultural movements around.

Okunov’s latest series most obviously reflects his background: He was raised in a Hasidic family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the second oldest of 13 children. “I draw inspiration from everything,” says the native Yiddish speaker, who can neither read nor write English. “Love, my mother’s tablecloth, where I came from — everything.” For this collection, Okunov intended his models to resemble Torahs, choosing fabric traditionally used for Torah mantles as the collection’s motif. With textile and installation artist Sascha Ascher, Okunov cut yards of the dark blue velvet, embroidered with the Ten Commandments in gold thread, into skirts, pants, and a long, one-shouldered dress. Okunov paired these pieces with parchment corsets and elaborate organza-and-parchment headpieces that recall the silver crowns that ornament Torahs. The packed room — which included men and women in modest and Hasidic dress among the many secular VIPs — exploded into gasps and laughter when the first “Torah” outfit came out. But shock value aside, there was something undeniably primal and unique to the corsets’ look of “unfinished” skin on skin. Other, less provocative garments included a dress hand-painted by the artist Rita Ackermann (who has a piece in the Whitney Biennial) and a gray spaghetti-strap dress made from parachute material and scrawled with English, Arabic, and Yiddish translations of verses by the Persian poet Rumi.

Okunov spent several years in Europe as a teenager, studying and interning with rabbis, but he returned to New York at 15, he says, “no longer ‘yeshiva’” — that is, no longer a traditional practicing Hasid. Shortly thereafter friends dressed the designer, who had spent most of his life in traditional black garb, in a “phenomenal vintage outfit” on the holiday of Purim — and introduced Okunov to fashion. He later discovered a sewing machine during a stint in rehab, where his parents sent him after finding him smoking marijuana. But aside from several months stocking the shelves at the Marc Jacobs store on Mercer Street, and a single course at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Okunov is self-taught.

Currently the designer is contemplating several projects, including collaborating with the Israeli painter Yigal Ozeri, for whom he may design costumes for an upcoming film. For now, Okunov plans to take some sewing machines with him to upstate New York, where he recently purchased some land. “When I started to do these shows, people said I was crazy,” he says. “I said I’m not looking to do an Old Navy line. I’m looking to make art.”