Fashion and design share a common language, owing much to each other progress. Although their products are usually different – in terms of use, material and destination – they ways the one influences the other are many and disparate. Technology, in particular, serves as an instrument for both design and fashion; the improvements each field makes turn out to be new instruments in the hands of the other.

Dress, Gianni Versace, ca. 1990; Vermelha Chair, Fernando Campana and Humberto Campana, 1993. Photo by Alberto Mayer, all rights reserved.

As it is clear in the pictures that compose MUDE – Museu do Design e da Moda curation of Europeana Fashion Tumblr, the boundaries among art, design and fashion are not strict. They are instead extremely blurred whether is the value and role we recognize to each of these practices, as these mainly work and proceed tightly connected one to each other, referencing each of the other disciplines and exploring common thematises.

Ensemble, Hussein Chalayan, 2000. Courtesy Les Arts Décoratifs, all rights reserved.

It is not surprising therefore that there are designers – in fashion and design – who not only cross the boundaries experimenting both in one and on the other field, but whose work focuses on lingering on this blurred boundary. However, these designers are not the only one that delve with this theme in their work.

Dress, Iris van Herpen, 2001. Courtesy Centraal Museum, all rights reserved.

In fact, common to the practice of design and fashion is new technologies, in its wider sense. Designers draw both from its past and its ultimate innovations, adapting them to their best use, could this be producing a lace or building door handle. Laser-cutting, cast moulding and 3D printing, for instance, are some of the practices that in recent times are borrowed by the practices of design and fashion.

Sharing technology, they also share the issues relate to it and their aims, sometimes, overlap. Reproducibility, democratisation and, more crucially, sustainability are issues that fashion and design are called to face. And while they seem to proceed parallel to each other, the ideas they develop and the problems they step into, both contribute to their research for new – and fashionable – solutions.