Unfit for its purpose

I've noted a philosophical oddity, and thought I'd bounce it off you my faithful blog-readers. Sometimes, being made for a specific purpose makes an item unfit for that purpose.

I'm thinking initially of "party favors" packaged as such on the party row of Wal-Mart. But I also see it with cheaper editions of fashions (like necklaces and hairbands), Christmas ornaments, scrapbooking kits, and more recently, wedding supplies.

It's not that those things are inherently unusable. My sister and I bought a package of cheap ornaments for table centerpieces, and while they'd have been tacky for a tree they were just right on tables. They're merely unusable for their intended purpose.

Of course, I'm thinking about this because I'm in the throes of planning a wedding. Creativity isn't so much coming up with new things (for there is nothing new under the sun, vanitas vanitatis) as it's coming up with new arrangements of old things. I love old things, though I don't mean to look like something escaped from a Renaissance Faire. There's a fuzzy continuum between boring, creative, and freakish.

But it just seems odd that purposing unfits a thing for that purpose. Is this a function of mass-production and unimaginative trend-copying? What to do, what to do?