The history of putting clothes on machines is older than the word "robot" itself. Long before Karel Capek coined the term in his 1920 play R.U.R., humans were building mechanical figures and dressing them in the fashions of their day. The impulse seems hardwired: if a thing looks vaguely human, we want to clothe it. That impulse has produced a century-long conversation between technology and fashion that is now, finally, becoming an industry.
The Automata Era: 1700s-1800s
European automata of the 18th century were mechanical marvels dressed as aristocrats. The Jaquet-Droz writing automaton of 1772, built by Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his son Henri-Louis, wore a miniature frock coat as it wrote with a quill pen. The automaton's clothing was not functional in any engineering sense. It was performance, a visual argument that this machine was civilized, refined, and worthy of attention.
Japanese karakuri dolls, which date to the Edo period (1603-1868), were similarly clothed. These wooden mechanisms, whose name comes from the Japanese verb karakuru (to pull or stretch a thread), performed tea-serving ceremonies in elaborate kimonos. The craftsmanship of karakuri is still alive today: Tamaya Shobei IX, a ninth-generation karakuri craftsperson based in Inuyama City, belongs to an unbroken lineage of artisans spanning almost 300 years. The mechanics of these early automata can be traced forward through Japan's industrial history to the steam-powered looms of Sakichi Toyoda and, eventually, to SoftBank's Pepper robot.
1927: Metropolis and the Machine-Human
Fritz Lang's Metropolis, released on January 10, 1927, introduced the Maschinenmensch (Machine-Human), cinema's first robot, and one of its most enduring images. German actress Brigitte Helm, nineteen years old at the time, played both Maria and the robot doppelganger created in her image.
The robot's costume took weeks to construct from "plastic wood," a moldable compound made from actual wood. Technicians took a full plaster cast of Helm's body, then built armor-like panels covered in cellon varnish mixed with bronze powder and applied with a spray gun, giving the costume its genuinely metallic appearance. Helm spent nine painful days filming in the costume during a Berlin winter in January 1926.
The Maschinenmensch established a visual vocabulary for robots that persists to this day. Its sleek, art deco lines influenced Ralph McQuarrie's original designs for C-3PO in Star Wars (1977). Its female form raised questions about gender, objectification, and the aesthetics of the machine body that fashion and robotics continue to grapple with.
1950s-1960s: Robby the Robot and the Golden Age of Sci-Fi
Robby the Robot, created for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, became the archetype of the "costumed robot" in popular culture. The design, by Robert Kinoshita, was essentially a wearable suit, an elaborate costume operated by a human performer. Robby's success (the costume cost $125,000 in 1956 dollars) demonstrated the commercial value of a robot's visual design. Robby appeared in dozens of films, TV shows, and commercials over the following decades, each time "wearing" a slightly different configuration of his modular design.
The distinction between "costume" and "body" was already blurring. Was Robby's dome-headed, barrel-bodied appearance his body or his clothing? For a human-operated suit, the answer is obviously "clothing." But the visual language that Robby established, the idea that a robot has a designed exterior that communicates its character, applies directly to today's humanoid robots.
2000: ASIMO and the Deliberate Design of Robot Appearance
Honda's ASIMO, first demonstrated publicly in 2000, was not clothed in the traditional sense. But its white shell was one of the most deliberate exercises in robot appearance design ever undertaken. Honda's design team made specific choices about form, color, and proportion to make the robot appear friendly and approachable. The white color communicated cleanliness and neutrality. The rounded forms avoided sharp edges that might suggest aggression. The backpack-like battery housing was integrated into the overall silhouette.
These are fashion decisions, whether Honda used that word or not. ASIMO's shell was a designed exterior that shaped public perception of the machine underneath. It is the direct ancestor of every robot covering produced since.
2014-2018: Pepper, AIBO, and the First Commercial Robot Clothing
SoftBank's Pepper (2014) created the first genuine commercial demand for robot clothing. When operators deployed Pepper in customer-facing roles, the immediate question was: how do we make it look like it belongs here? The first Pepper outfits were improvised. Within a few years, companies like Bonuni in Japan were producing professional uniforms for Pepper, and the Rierie online shop was selling fashion garments at prices ranging from 3,000 to 25,000 yen.
Sony's relaunched AIBO (2018) generated a different kind of clothing market, accessories for a pet robot. Bandanas, custom ears, collars, and seasonal costumes emerged from both official and third-party sources, demonstrating that robot clothing demand extended to non-humanoid platforms.
1999-2007: McQueen, Chalayan, and the Haute Couture Experiments
Parallel to the commercial development of robot clothing, the world of haute couture was conducting its own experiments. Alexander McQueen's No. 13 finale in 1999 used industrial robots to spray-paint a dress in real time. Hussein Chalayan's mechanical dresses of 2007 used embedded motors and cables to create garments that transformed their own shape on the runway.
These were not commercial products. They were conceptual arguments about the relationship between fashion and technology, presented on the runway as performance art. But they established the intellectual foundation for robot couture as a discipline, proving that machines and fashion could interact in ways that were technically sophisticated, emotionally powerful, and culturally significant.
2016-2023: From Experiment to Spectacle
Iris van Herpen used robotic arms to construct a dress live on the runway (2016). Coperni sprayed a dress onto Bella Hadid's body using Fabrican technology (2022). Coperni deployed Boston Dynamics' Spot on the Paris runway (2023). Hugo Boss brought Sophia the robot to Milan Fashion Week (2023). Schiaparelli presented a crystal-encrusted robot baby (2024).
Each of these moments pushed the conversation forward, but they shared a common limitation: they were about fashion using robots, not about fashion for robots. The robots were props, performers, or spectacles. They were not customers.
2024-2026: The Tipping Point
The shift from robots as fashion accessories to robots as fashion consumers happened rapidly. In 2024, Giuseppe di Morabito's show at Milan Fashion Week featured Ameca, Engineered Arts' humanoid, as a performer rather than a prop. XPeng unveiled the IRON with customizable synthetic skin. Figure AI announced the Figure 03 with integrated washable textiles.
In 2025, the Noetix N2 walked a Paris catwalk wearing actual clothing, vintage garments sourced from a local shop. Unitree's G1 appeared at Shanghai Fashion Week wearing a custom outfit and receiving a 3D-printed necklace. These were not fashion houses using robots for effect. These were robots wearing clothes.
The timeline now bends sharply upward. Tesla plans thousands of Optimus units. Unitree plans 20,000 robots in 2026 following its Spring Festival Gala sensation. Figure, XPeng, and Agility Robotics are all scaling production. Each of those robots will have an exterior. Many will wear clothing. The industry that produces that clothing is forming right now.
For three hundred years, we dressed machines as curiosities. Now we are dressing them for work. The transition from spectacle to industry happened in less than a decade.
What the Timeline Reveals
Three patterns emerge from this history. First, the impulse to clothe machines is ancient and cross-cultural. It appears in Europe, Japan, and America, in art, commerce, and entertainment. Second, each era's robot clothing reflects that era's technology: hand-carved wood in the 18th century, spray-painted metal in the 1920s, injection-molded plastic in the 2000s, washable knitwear in the 2020s. Third, the transition from decorative clothing (costumes for display) to functional clothing (garments for working machines) has accelerated dramatically in the past five years.
The history of robots in fashion is no longer a story about the past. It is the opening chapter of a story about the future.