September 30, 2022. The Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris, a museum dedicated to the history of technology, housed inside a medieval priory. Supermodel Bella Hadid walked onto a brightly lit platform wearing nothing but nude underwear. Around her stood a team of technicians holding what looked like airbrush guns. Over the course of fifteen minutes, they sprayed a white substance onto her body, and a dress materialized.
When they were done, a woman stepped forward, shaped the straps to fall off the shoulders, and cut a slit up the side with scissors. Hadid walked the runway in a garment that had not existed twenty minutes earlier. The moment generated $26.3 million in media impact value and became the most discussed fashion event of the year.
It was also, though almost no one framed it this way at the time, a proof of concept for robot fashion.
The Technology: What Fabrican Actually Is
The spray-on material is called Fabrican, and it was not invented by Coperni. It was developed by Manel Torres, a Spanish scientist and fashion designer who founded the company in 2003. Torres had spent years at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London developing what he called "instant non-woven fabric."
Fabrican is a suspension of short fibers bound together with stretchy polymers in a liquid solvent. When sprayed from a pressurized canister, the solvent evaporates on contact with a surface, leaving behind a mesh of interlocked fibers and polymers. The result is a thin, flexible, non-woven textile that adheres to whatever it was sprayed onto.
The material can be peeled off, re-dissolved, and re-sprayed. It can be made from natural fibers (cotton, wool) or synthetic ones (polyester, nylon). Additives can give it antimicrobial properties, fragrance, or color. Torres has described it as "fashion in a can", a garment delivery system that eliminates cutting, sewing, and fitting entirely.
Torres patented the technology in the mid-2000s and spent nearly two decades trying to find the right application for it. Medical bandaging, wound care, and industrial coatings were all explored. But it was Coperni's creative directors, Sebastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, who saw its potential as a fashion statement, and used it to create a moment that no one in the room would forget.
How Coperni Pulled It Off
The Coperni show was the closing event of Paris Fashion Week's Spring/Summer 2023 presentations. The venue was deliberately chosen: the Musee des Arts et Metiers houses one of Europe's oldest collections of scientific instruments and industrial machinery. Fashion meeting technology was the conceptual frame.
The spray-on sequence was choreographed as the show's finale. Hadid entered the platform. The Fabrican team, who had been rehearsing the process for days, began spraying in coordinated movements, building up layers of white fiber on her torso, waist, and legs. The process required even coverage, consistent distance from the body, and careful timing to avoid clumping or tearing.
The transition from spray to garment took about fifteen minutes. The finishing touches, adjusting the neckline, creating a leg slit, were performed by hand, introducing traditional tailoring gestures into what was otherwise a completely non-traditional garment creation process.
The audience reaction was immediate. Phones were raised. Videos were uploaded before the show had ended. Within hours, the clip was everywhere, and Coperni had achieved what every fashion brand wants: a moment that defines a season.
If you can spray a dress onto a human body, you can spray one onto a robot body. The implications are not trivial.
Why This Matters for Robot Clothing
The connection between Coperni's spray-on dress and robot fashion may not be immediately obvious. After all, the Fabrican team was spraying onto a human model, not a machine. But consider the challenges that robot clothing designers face every day.
Non-standard body geometry. Every robot platform has a different shape. There are no standard sizes. Custom pattern-making for each platform is expensive and time-consuming. A spray-on approach eliminates this problem entirely. The material conforms to whatever shape it is applied to, whether that shape is a human torso, a Tesla Optimus, or a Boston Dynamics Spot.
Rapid application. Getting a garment onto a robot is not trivial. Robots have hard edges, protruding joints, and sensor arrays that make traditional dressing difficult. Spray application could allow a robot to be "dressed" in minutes without the need for complex closure systems, zippers, or magnetic attachments.
Sensor transparency. One of the biggest challenges in robot clothing is avoiding sensor occlusion, covering cameras, LiDAR, or infrared sensors with opaque fabric. A spray-on material could be formulated to be transparent to specific wavelengths, allowing it to cover a sensor without blocking it. Torres has already demonstrated that Fabrican can be made with varying optical properties.
Easy removal and replacement. Fabrican peels off cleanly. For a hotel robot that needs a uniform change, or a warehouse robot that needs its covering replaced after contamination, peel-and-respray is far simpler than removing and laundering a traditional garment.
Custom branding at scale. A fleet of 500 hotel robots could each receive a spray-on covering in the hotel's brand colors, applied in minutes using an automated spray system. Color changes become trivial, switch the canister, respray. No inventory of different-colored garments needed.
The Spot Dogs and the Follow-Up
Coperni continued its engagement with robotics at its Fall/Winter 2023 show, where Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs appeared on the runway alongside human models. Spot robots interacted with models, held handbags, and at one point used a mechanical arm to pull a jacket off a model's shoulders.
This second show cemented Coperni's reputation as the fashion house most willing to engage directly with robotics. But whereas the Spot appearance was spectacle, the robots were not wearing clothing themselves, the spray-on dress was something more fundamental. It was a demonstration that garment creation could happen outside the traditional manufacturing pipeline, that a body (any body, human or otherwise) could serve as its own mannequin, and that clothing could be produced on demand, in any shape, on any surface.
Fabrican's Next Steps
Torres and the Fabrican team have continued developing the technology since the Coperni moment. Research is ongoing into formulations that offer greater durability, stretch, and washability. The current material, while dramatic on the runway, has limitations for everyday wear. It is relatively thin, cannot withstand repeated machine washing in its basic form, and has limited structural integrity for complex garments.
For robot applications, however, some of these limitations matter less. A robot covering does not need to survive a washing machine if it can simply be peeled off and replaced with a fresh application. Thickness can be built up through multiple spray passes. And structural integrity can be supplemented by spraying over a lightweight framework or mesh that provides the garment's shape while the Fabrican provides the surface texture and color.
Several research groups have begun exploring spray-on materials specifically for robotic coverings. The appeal is obvious: a maintenance technician could respray a robot's exterior in minutes, changing its color, repairing damage, or updating its branding without removing any components or shutting down the machine for extended periods.
Automated Spray Application: The Missing Link
At Coperni's show, humans operated the spray guns. But there is no technical reason why the spray process cannot be automated. Industrial spray painting robots have existed for decades, they are a staple of automotive manufacturing. A robot arm equipped with a Fabrican dispenser could spray a covering onto another robot's body with precision and consistency that no human hand could match.
Imagine a robotic "dressing station" in a hotel basement or warehouse entrance. A service robot rolls in, a spray arm applies a fresh covering in the correct brand colors, and the robot rolls out dressed for its shift. When the shift ends, the covering is peeled off and recycled. The entire process takes minutes and requires no human labor.
This scenario is not science fiction. Every component of it exists today. Fabrican provides the material. Industrial spray robots provide the application system. The only missing piece is someone putting them together for the specific purpose of clothing a robot.
Beyond Fabrican: Other Spray-On Approaches
Fabrican is not the only spray-on material with potential for robot fashion. Researchers at several institutions are developing alternatives. Electrospun nanofiber mats can be deposited onto surfaces in thin, uniform layers. Aerogel coatings can provide thermal insulation in spray form. And various polymer systems can create flexible, durable coatings that adhere to complex three-dimensional shapes.
The broader category, additive garment manufacturing, where material is deposited directly onto a body rather than cut and assembled from flat fabric, is one of the most promising approaches to the robot clothing challenge. It solves the fit problem, the speed problem, and the customization problem simultaneously.
What Coperni Got Right
Coperni understood something that many fashion houses have not: technology is not a threat to fashion. It is an expansion of fashion's vocabulary. The spray-on dress was not a gimmick. It was a demonstration that garment creation could happen in ways that the industry had never considered, that the relationship between body and clothing could be fundamentally different, and that the future of fashion would be built by people who understood materials science as well as they understood draping and pattern-making.
For robot fashion specifically, Coperni's contribution is enormous. The spray-on dress proved that custom-fit garments could be created on demand, on any body, without traditional manufacturing. That insight, obvious in retrospect, revolutionary in execution, will underpin much of what comes next in the field of dressing machines.
Somewhere in a lab, someone is loading a Fabrican canister onto a robotic arm and pointing it at a mannequin shaped like a humanoid robot. When that experiment works, and it will, we will trace the line back to a September evening in Paris, a museum of technology, and a white dress that appeared out of thin air.