We're used to seeing interior design take its direction from the runway.

For one fashion-design project at Kent State University, though, it was the other way around.

As one of their final assignments, seniors at the university's Shannon Rodgers and Jerry Silverman School of Fashion Design and Merchandising created couture clothing using fabrics from HGTV star Candice Olson's furniture collection. Olson designs the sofas, chairs and other pieces for Ohio's Norwalk Furniture, which supplied 213 yards of fabric for the project.

This is fabric meant to hold up to bouncing kids and dog slobber, not the garment-weight materials that fashion designers typically work with. Yet the 24 students managed to turn sturdy damasks and chunky matelasses into elegant gowns — some fitted and sleek, some billowy and dramatic.

The project, reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara's drapery-fabric fashion in Gone With the Wind, was the brainchild of Norwalk Furniture and its Beachwood public relations firm, Lief & Karson Communications. They approached both Olson and the fashion school with the idea.

Olson embraced it. For years, she said, she's pondered the fashion possibilities of the
upholstery fabrics she works with.

''Many times I've said, 'This would make such a fabulous jacket or pair of pants,' '' she said by phone from High Point, N.C., where she was promoting her collection last month. Here was an opportunity to see those fantasies realized.

Challenge for students

The students, however, were less than enthusiastic.

''They were like, no. They were not pleased,'' associate professor Sherry Schofield-Tomschin recalled with a smile. Upholstery fabric is stiff, they argued. It doesn't drape well. How in the world were they supposed to work with it?

It didn't help that the students had to fit the assignment around their work on their all-important senior line, she said. Nor did it help that the project coincided with the emotional and physical burnout that's common as graduation approaches.

Schofield-Tomschin admitted even she was skeptical when she first heard the idea. After she thought about it awhile, though, she realized the assignment would challenge the students.

After all, when they're employed in the fashion industry, they're going to find themselves dealing with parameters beyond their control, both Olson and Schofield-Tomschin pointed out. Making it work is a lesson with real-life applications.

Besides, Schofield-Tomschin noted, some of a designer's best work comes when things don't go easily or turn out the way they were planned.

About 25 fabrics were chosen for the project, including many with a sheen or shimmer — an Olson trademark — as well as the oversize damasks the interior designer favors.

Senior Alyse Kimble of Wooster chose a blue-brown matelasse, a quilted fabric often used in bedspreads, for the swirled gown she was pinning to a dress form about three weeks ago. She'd made a pattern for the gown earlier, she said, but she found herself improvising after realizing she needed a side seam so the grain of the fabric would run in the right direction.

''I'm not used to working with this thick of a fabric,'' she said as she struggled to manipulate the heavy material into delicate tucks. The dress, she said, is ''definitely very challenging.''

You wouldn't know it from the result. Kimble's gown, a gracefully fitted design with a split back and train, was one of 19 chosen by faculty members for last week's year-end fashion show, Portfolio 2008.

The gowns ranged in attitude from a short, flirty halter dress with a flounced train to a shimmery confection with layers of blousy gathers. The designers managed to take advantage of the fabrics' rigid nature, using it to create exaggerated features like a strap that floated above a model's shoulder.

The gowns were theatrical, elegant and in some cases ''so frickin' heavy that we're going to need body-building models,'' Schofield-Tomschin joked before the show.

They were also innovative. And that was the whole point.