The constantly increasing customer's demands and the necessary reduction of weight and fuel consumption for climate protection as well as the increasing function-integration are pressing influence factors for the design of new lightweight structures e. g. lightweight car bodies. In the course of these challenging demands the use of new active and multifunctional textile kinematic structures plays a key role for the realization of new lightweight applications. This is due to the fact that kinematic tasks are of major importance for many lightweight structures. Here, textile-reinforced composites offer totally new possibilities for a function-integrated design of new flexural compliant structures due to their versatile anisotropic property profile. Thus, novel composite flexural structures with a specific deformation characteristic can be developed, which have no clearance and are easy to assemble. Compared to conventional rigid-link mechanisms these compliant structures allow to realize complicated motion sequences without additional segments. Moreover, the material-adapted embedding of piezo-ceramic actuators rises the possibility to design structural-integrated drives. At the TU Dresden kinematic and kinetic basic design strategies have been developed for the analysis of multistage fiber-reinforced kinematic structures. Here, multilayered composite elements are modelled as structures considering large, geometrically non-linear deformation and anisotropic material behaviour as well as integrated actuators. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the necessary development of material-adapted manufacturing technologies and actuator-specific design principles for smart textile kinematic structures with polymer matrices.