They call him a visionary. Provocative. His clothes are, they say, unwearable. What, a frock that turns into a table? Very useful when I'm down at Tesco. Hussein Chalayan is difficult. The last thing a truly savvy fashion designer wants to hear. Intellect, vision, and provocation do not butter the parsnips. Not quite like fabulous, sexy and glamorous. So while others of his gilded generation, such as Stella McCartney, have gone on to fame, riches and Heat magazine, Chalayan seems doomed, or blessed, to remain renowned as the obscure one. He might get the accolades, the MBE, Designer of the Year awards two years running, the critical fuss and the sales to Tilda Swinton, architects and curators, but he stubbornly refuses to sell out. In all senses.

The spectre of Alexander McQueen looms particularly large. McQueen, a year older than Chalayan, graduated from Central St Martins College of Art the year before, in 1992, but has managed subtly to translate high concept into sales in a manner that continues to elude Chalayan. In 2000, when Tom Ford was looking for a new helmsman for Gucci, Chalayan was wined and dined, but it was McQueen who was chosen.

Like McQueen, Chalayan pioneered importing the conceptual sense of a YBA into fashion. His clothes are, he says, as much about storytelling and narrative as cut, material and line, nipping between philosophy, genetics and contemporary geopolitics faster than you can say absolutely fabulous. One collection deconstructs Kazakhstani costume, another is a comment on cultural displacement (a common theme for this Turkish Cypriot), the next spins off from a quote by Wittgenstein.

His catwalk shows are as infamous for their gnomic performance art as their clothes, giving breezy fashionistas their twice-yearly injection of brains. But he seems to have imported somewhat less of the YBAs' canny business sense. His own label famously went bankrupt in 2001, with debts of £250,000. He bounced back. But eight years on you get the sense that this Heston Blumenthal of fashion is still waiting for his snail-porridge moment. He thinks too deeply - a compliment, but a backhanded one in the fashion world. Cleverer still would be brainy work that flies off the shelves.

This retrospective is not a relaunch. But it is, perhaps, a rethinking. Last year, after years of faltering partnerships, Chalayan finally found his match, as creative director of the German sportswear brand Puma. While this lurch for the middle end of the mass market might seem odd, it's that very contrariness that makes it a typically Chalayan move. What's the sly devil up to? At a time when mainstream fashion has shifted firmly away from slovenliness and trainers back towards stilettos, suits and mind your ps and qs, what's a clever clogs to do but do the opposite?

Fashion, though, is as tricky to turn into an exhibition as architecture. Like buildings, clothes are limp and lifeless without human bodies to animate them. They make no sense. Unlike buildings, though, at least you can actually squeeze frocks into a display case. But Chalayan in particular has made his reputation by invigorating fashion with dazzling performance.

His work is all about the movement of bodies - micro and macro scale - such as that infamous frock-cum-

table, exhibited here. It was part of his After Words collection in 2000, in which models donned chairs and tables, a nod, Chalayan says, to the plight of refugees who flee their homes during war, as happened to his own family before the partition of Cyprus in 1974. Then there was his Readings collection last summer, also here, in which the clothes used motorised lasers and crystals to dazzle the audience with artificial rays of sunshine. A comment on celebrity worship, since you ask.

Such performance is tough to recreate in an exhibition, at least not without major resources. And despite employing (or subverting) mannequins by contorting them in all manner of activities (painting walls, balancing on balls), showing us his short films, footage of his catwalk performances and even artier excursions, the exhibition design is characteristically spare, for Chalayan, but uncharacteristically conventional. The idea, says Donna Loveday, its curator, “is to revel in the clothes”.

Fair enough. The clothes are fabulous. Of course, all fashion designers talk of their inspiration and allusions. But, for Chalayan, the concept is equally important as the cut. Now whether or not you find all this a bit emperor's new clothes lives or dies by the concept. And Chalayan mostly carries this off. His exploration of the cultural meaning of clothes always avoids those evils of the fashion world - triteness and faux profundity - even if it veers a little towards the pretentious.

He's saved, always, by fashion's ultimate USP. Clothes, as Chalayan reiterates, may be cultural markers, ways of marking oneself as a tribe, carriers of stories, means of oppression and suppression, but in the end the international language of fashion is sex. And Chalayan never sacrifices cut for concept. He is a master tailor, a stunning craftsman. It might seem more superficial, but without it he'd be just another conceptual artist in a world with more than enough of them. That combination of intellect with sensuality, at its best, can be incredible.

The irony is, though, that this exhibition is not conceptual enough. Indeed it feels almost like a commercial. You can't avoid Puma's logo. Which would almost be acceptable were Chalayan given the resources to run wild with his capacious imagination. But curating clothes is a tricky art. This exhibition falls between two stools. It isn't a conceptual art show. It doesn't let the work just speak for itself, and, even if it tried to, without more lavish animation and curating of the clothes the essential conceptual magic of Chalayan's work would be lost. Instead it attempts to explain the work, but never does so with either critical distance or accessibility.

How can clothes be conceptual? How do they tell stories? It might be clear as a bell to Chalayan and those who buy his clothes, but telling your average Joe at the sales at Primark that his smalls are a comment on the global financial system might just get you a smack in the chops.

His clothes are astonishing. You would think this would be enough for him. But it seems as though Chalayan now wants to be understood by a wider audience. Yet if he stands any chance of stepping outside the pigeonhole that he and the fashion world have saddled the man with - gnomic visionary, conceptual artist - he, and those who work with him, must (like McQueen perhaps) find a more accessible way in which to communicate with the rest of us who are not part of the cognoscenti.

Maybe that will come with his work with Puma. Maybe he's found that winning combination of brains and brawn in some new trainer concept. But whatever way he goes, if Chalayan wants to sell, he'll have to sell out - a little, at least.

Hussein Chalayan: From Fashion and Back is at the Design Museum, SE1 (www.designmuseum.org, 020-7403 6933), from tomorrow until May 17

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