Fashion’s symbiotic relationship with design, architecture and industrial design can be spotted in everything from architect Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall house to industrial designer Patricia Urquiola’s Smock chair. Couturiers like Hussein Chayalan and Issey Miyake have made careers out of stretching the functionality of clothing.

The crossover creates a wonderful playground for a slew of artists and designers now exploring multi-purpose design. Artist Andrea Zittel is channeling her utilitarian spirit into a collection of wraparound dresses that celebrate economy – in material and design, a sure-to-be recurring theme in the coming years. For Munich’s Tanja Pol Galerie, Zittel released her basic design to Smockshop, a collective of smockers, who injected their own colours, textures and patterns into the everywoman’s garment. While parlaying her signature theme of making the most out of the city’s encroaching confines, the 300 dresses now on display at the gallery also speak to how the strictures of our new economic reality could  create new creative possibilities in the pursuit of hot streetwear.

At Salone Satellite, the young designers' fair within Milan’s Salone del Mobile, the collective United Design showed off a couple of exercises in maximizing functionality by blurring the boundaries between fashion and furniture. Elisa Strozyk’s Wooden Textiles is an origami-like flexible tapestry made of wood pieces. It might be used as a blanket, a carpet, or even a tablecloth. And Scarlett O’Hara has nothing on Eunsuk Hur, the designer behind Nomadic Wonderland – a wall covering and a fanciful frock waiting to be donned. Its wool modules can be disassembled and re-fashioned into romantically whimsical dresses.

In the vein of full-on Japanese-style experimentation, Kosuke Tsumura tailored a futuristic yet organic concept for newborn babies and their mothers for an exhibit called Senseware that recently took over Milan's Triennale. He worked with the cutting-edge Felibendy, a nonwoven fabric made of plastic-coated fibres steam-formed into shape. He moulded a soft crib with ivy-like reliefs, and he also crafted an ice-queen’s baby-doll dress. A nursing mom might appreciate the detachable modules, but would probably have a hard time with the exploded hood resembling an arctic snowdrift.

For more on Senseware's quirky innovations, check out the July/August issue of Azure.