Fashion has always been in a state of constant flux. Even in 12th-century China, a monarch was said to have enjoyed women wearing dangling pearls and jade in a "hair-knot that sways at every step", while the emperor who built the Great Wall preferred a "hair-knot that rises above the clouds". Women of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) wore the "hair-knot of the homing bird", and a writer in the last years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) described the "hair-knot of disintegration and homeless wandering" as a style of the day. "The times are indeed out of joint," he wrote. "I tremble to think what is to come."

What came was modernity. In 1993, Estelle Ellis, Seventeen magazine's founding promotion director, gave a speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, in which she explained: "Fashion is a perpetual-motion machine expressed in four areas: 'mode' – the way we dress; 'manners' – the way we express ourselves; 'mores' – the way we live; and 'markets' – the way we are defined demographically and psychologically."

Every culture, society and group has its own fashion codes, and this has given rise to a form of communication that resembles a game. In today's breakneck digital world of social networking, anyone can transmit images of their attire, ushering in a new phase in the way we engage with fashion.

Until October 14, Japan's National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and the Kyoto Costume Institute are staging Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion? The exhibition focuses on contemporary fashion, encouraging viewers to re-examine dress codes in contemporary society and our apparel practices – or games.

Rather than being a historical narrative or an unravelling of a particular designer's work, Dress Code is laid out under a series of themes, all of which spur questions of fashion's intricate codes. For example, is it a violation of the code to walk around outside naked? Is it necessary to be artistically and culturally literate? Should you be aware of how others look at you? Is it wrong to listen to what adults say? Can everyone be fashionable? And do all of the above criteria make fashion an endless game?

The title of the exhibition hits the spot in terms of topicality. Among many examples, China's fixation with gamification and its relation to the world of fashion and cosmetics has seen luxury brands attempt to make their offerings more playful via arcade-style promotions, claw-grabbing machines and digital live-streaming events. And as it is in competitive sports, the players and spectators can be interchangeable.

Wearing clothes are an act of becoming someone. Dress Code explores the diverse practices of contemporary artists and their relationship to the meaning of fashion.

In his most recent work, Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom has been taking photos of passers-by on streets all over the world for more than 15 years. Several people in the same place on the same day are often wearing similar outfits – a reminder that style is an expression of individuality but is seldom unique.

Renowned American photographer Cindy Sherman has worked exclusively in self-portraits since the 1970s; her Society Portraits series from 2008 acts out stereotypes popularised in popular media, and embodies her critique of superficial values such as anti-ageing and social status.

Yasumasa Morimura, a Japanese appropriation artist who re-enacts historical portraits and photos, bends roles and gender in Self-Portrait as Marilyn in Tokyo University, Komaba Campus, where he assumes Marilyn Monroe's identity while striking the famous pose in which she holds down her skirt while the wind blows from below – as a bunch of bored-looking university students sit unmoved in a lecture hall.

To explore the relationship between characters and clothing in theatre, film and manga, the Kyoto Costume Institute commissioned artists to create work based on the exhibition concept. These include Shinichi Sakamoto, the author of the manga series Innocent and Innocent Rouge, as well as the theater companies Mum & Gypsy and Chelfitsch. The latter two make use of the Costume Institute's vast collection, highlighting the process of choosing clothing to match the personalities of each character in a theatrical work – and the resulting creation mirrors the everyday action of picking out clothes when we get up in the morning.

It all serves as a reminder that we unconsciously participate in the game of fashion. And it's not just how we wear items, but the process, from those "hair-knots swaying at every step" to what sneakers we'll choose to put on the domestic robots and accessorial androids-du-jour of the future.

Are you ready to play?