Fashion has always been a stage for provocation. But over the past quarter century, a particular kind of provocation has recurred with increasing frequency: the appearance of actual robots at major fashion weeks. These moments range from calculated spectacle to genuine attempts at integrating machines into the design process. Taken together, they trace a line from pure theater to something approaching a real shift in how fashion thinks about non-human bodies.
What follows is every significant instance we have been able to document, drawn from show records, press archives, and interviews with people who were in the room.
1999: Alexander McQueen's No. 13. The One That Started Everything
On a runway in London, model Shalom Harlow stood on a slowly rotating platform between two industrial robotic arms borrowed from a car manufacturing plant. She wore a strapless white muslin dress. The arms, programmed over the course of a week, jerked to life, investigated her body with mechanical curiosity, and then sprayed her with black and acid yellow paint.
The performance, which closed McQueen's Spring/Summer 1999 collection titled No. 13, remains one of the most iconic moments in fashion history. McQueen cited Rebecca Horn's 1991 installation "High Moon" as the inspiration. The robots were not fashion accessories or decoration. They were collaborators in an act of creative destruction, transforming a white garment into something unrepeatable. The dress, stained and unique, later appeared in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Savage Beauty" exhibition.
This was not a robot wearing clothes. It was a robot making clothes, in real time, on a human body. That distinction matters. McQueen demonstrated that machines could participate in the creative act of fashion, not just manufacture it.
2007: Hussein Chalayan's Shape-Shifting Mechanical Dresses
For his Spring/Summer 2007 collection, Cypriot-British designer Hussein Chalayan unveiled a series of six mechanized dresses that morphed through a century of fashion silhouettes on the runway. The first dress walked out in a 1906 costume and transformed through 1916 and 1926, ending as a beaded flapper dress. Subsequent dresses evolved through their own three-decade cycles, with the final garment morphing through 1986, 1996, and 2007.
Chalayan spent six months developing the dresses with Moritz Waldemeyer, a former robotics researcher at Philips. The engineering firm 2D3D designed the computer systems hidden beneath each skirt. Monofilament cables in hollow tubes connected to motors that pulled wires attached to the exterior of each garment, causing zippers to close, cloth to gather, and hemlines to rise, all without human hands touching the fabric.
Chalayan had been exploring the boundary between clothing and technology for years. His earlier "Remote Control" dress, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, included a fiberglass and resin airplane shape that folded up to reveal tulle underneath. But the 2007 show represented the most technically ambitious integration of robotics into actual garments that anyone had attempted. The dresses were not worn by robots. They were robots themselves, disguised as clothing.
2016: Iris van Herpen's Robotic Dress Construction
Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen has built her career on the intersection of fashion and technology. For her Spring/Summer 2016 show, she invited actress Gwendoline Christie to lie on a circular plinth while three robotic arms performed a live construction of a dress around her body. The arms combined 3D printing, laser cutting, and weaving in real time.
The robots themselves were covered in a spiky material "grown" using magnets by designer Jolan van der Wiel, who had previously collaborated with van Herpen on magnetic shoes and garments. The performance blurred the line between manufacturing demonstration and couture presentation. For van Herpen, the point was that fashion making itself could be beautiful, not just the finished product.
2022: Coperni's Spray-On Dress. The Fabrican Moment
On September 30, 2022, at the Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris, supermodel Bella Hadid walked onto a lit platform in nothing but nude underwear. A team surrounded her holding spray guns loaded with Fabrican, a liquid fiber bound together with stretchy polymers developed by Spanish scientist and fashion designer Manel Torres, who had founded the company in 2003.
Over fifteen minutes, the team sprayed a white substance onto Hadid's body, gradually forming the outline of a dress. When the spraying was complete, a technician stepped forward to shape the straps and cut a slit up the side. Hadid then walked the runway in a garment that had been created on her body moments earlier.
While no robots operated the spray guns, that was still a human job, the event generated $26.3 million in media impact value and introduced millions of people to the concept of computationally aided garment creation. Coperni's creative directors, Sebastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, positioned the moment as a glimpse of fashion's technological future. The solvents evaporate on contact with skin, leaving only fibers and polymers behind. The material can be peeled off, re-sprayed, and reworked.
The implications for robot fashion are clear: if a garment can be sprayed onto a human body, it can certainly be sprayed onto a robot body, potentially offering custom-fit coverings without any tailoring at all.
2023: Coperni's Spot Dogs Take Paris
Coperni doubled down on its tech-fashion reputation at its Fall/Winter 2023 show in Paris, this time deploying Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs on the runway. Several of the yellow, canine-shaped quadrupeds paced alongside human models, interacting with them in choreographed sequences. One Spot robot used its mechanical arm to caress a model's face before tugging her jacket off. Another held a Coperni handbag aloft in its gripper.
The visual impact was immediate. Fashion press covered the Spot appearances more than the clothing itself, which raised questions about whether robots at fashion shows were genuine design statements or merely attention-seeking stunts. Either way, Coperni demonstrated that robot bodies, even non-humanoid ones, could share a runway with human models without the event collapsing into comedy.
2023: Hugo Boss Techtopia, Sophia Takes Milan
At Milan Fashion Week in February 2023, Hugo Boss transformed its runway venue at the Allianz MiCo conference center into what it called the "BOSS Techtopia." The star guest was not a human celebrity but Sophia, the humanoid robot built by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics and activated on Valentine's Day 2016.
The Boss team spent six months working with Hanson Robotics to prepare three Sophia robots for the event. Sophia staffed the entrance, mingled with over 1,000 guests using face and hand detection capabilities, and sat front row during the show, dressed in BOSS business-ready suiting. The "CorpCore" collection re-imagined traditional office attire through a technological lens.
Sophia's appearance was more than a novelty. As the innovation ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme, the robot brought a level of institutional credibility that previous robot-fashion crossovers had lacked. This was not a factory arm spraying paint. This was a social robot, dressed for work, attending a professional event. The distinction matters enormously for the future of robot fashion: it suggested that robots could be fashion consumers, not just fashion props.
2024: Schiaparelli's Crystal Robot Baby
At Schiaparelli's Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2024 show in Paris, creative director Daniel Roseberry introduced one of the most surreal fashion moments of the decade. Model Maggie Maurer cradled a robot baby adorned with Swarovski crystals, computer circuit boards, electrical components, and microchips. The baby, roughly infant-sized, was dressed as a jeweled artifact, part machine, part living creature, part luxury object.
Roseberry's intention was to provoke questions about technology's role in human life, a theme Schiaparelli's founder Elsa Schiaparelli explored in her own collaborations with Salvador Dali in the 1930s. The robot baby was not functional in any meaningful sense. It was sculptural. But it entered fashion's visual vocabulary permanently, appearing across social media and editorial coverage for weeks.
2024: Ameca at Milan Fashion Week
At Giuseppe di Morabito's show during Milan Fashion Week 2024, Engineered Arts' Ameca, one of the world's most advanced humanoid robots in terms of facial expression, took the stage. Ameca awakened, moved expressively, and read philosophical excerpts before model Yasmin Wijnaldum appeared to engage with the robot in a choreographed dialogue between human and machine.
Ameca's appearance represented a different kind of robot-fashion integration than what had come before. Rather than serving as a prop or a stunt, Ameca was positioned as a performer with its own presence. The robot's ability to generate realistic facial expressions allowed it to participate in the emotional atmosphere of a fashion show in a way that previous robots could not.
2025: Unitree G1 at Shanghai Fashion Week
On March 26, 2025, at the Xintiandi venue during Shanghai Fashion Week, Unitree Robotics' humanoid G1 and its quadrupedal robot companion took center stage at the NMTG fashion show. Creative director Xu Shangxi had drawn inspiration from Unitree's viral Chinese New Year performance, where the G1 dazzled audiences with traditional dance moves.
The show was described as less traditional catwalk and more immersive behavioral art. The robotic dog flipped mid-stage to reveal a custom outfit. The G1 humanoid then came to life, interacting with a blue-clad model who shook its hand and adorned it with a 3D-printed necklace shaped like a deer, a symbol of harmony and hope.
The G1, launched in May 2024 at a starting price of 99,000 yuan (roughly $13,700), stands 127 centimeters tall and weighs 35 kilograms. Its AI-driven full-body motion control enables dynamic movements including dancing and coordinated routines. "I wanted to explore the symbiosis of nature, humanity and technology," Xu told press after the show.
2025: The Noetix N2 in Paris, Fashion Week's First Humanoid Model
On October 8, 2025, at a UNESCO venue in Paris, the Noetix N2 became what TIME magazine called "Paris Fashion Week's most important model", and it was not human. The Chinese humanoid robot, created by Beijing-based Noetix Robotics, walked a catwalk wearing a waistcoat and pearls in what was described as the first outing of its kind outside China.
The backstory was not entirely smooth. A planned collaboration with a Chinese designer had fallen apart at the eleventh hour over a funding dispute. N2's team improvised, sourcing three outfits from a local Parisian vintage shop and staging a mini-show after the official Paris Fashion Week calendar had closed. Press and fashion fans showed up anyway.
The N2 stands 118 centimeters tall, weighs 30 kilograms, and features 18 degrees of freedom with peak torque of 150 Nm. It supports anthropomorphic walking, gesture interaction, and speech recognition powered by machine learning systems. It can run, jump, and perform continuous backflips, though it struggles with stairs, which limited its venue options in Paris.
Noetix announced at CES 2026 that it would deliver its first batch of 1,000 units overseas, positioning the N2 as not just a runway novelty but a commercial product that will eventually need clothing solutions at scale.
The question is no longer whether robots belong on the runway. The question is what they should wear when they get there.
2026: Unitree at the Spring Festival Gala
While not technically a fashion week, Unitree Robotics' appearance at the 2026 Chinese Spring Festival Gala deserves mention for its sheer scale and cultural impact. Multiple Unitree robots performed kung fu and somersaults before an estimated 679 million viewers, making it the single largest audience to watch robots perform choreographed movement in history.
The performance catapulted Unitree into mainstream consciousness overnight. The company subsequently announced plans to produce 20,000 robots in 2026. Every single one of those robots was dressed for the performance, costumed in custom coverings that had to survive the demands of acrobatic movement. It was, in its own way, one of the largest robot fashion projects ever undertaken.
What These Appearances Tell Us
Taken together, these events reveal a clear trajectory. In 1999, robots at fashion shows were shocking. By 2007, they were technically impressive. By 2022, they were viral marketing. By 2025, they were modeling actual clothes.
The shift from robots-as-tools to robots-as-wearers is the story that matters. McQueen used robots to make fashion. Coperni used robots for spectacle. Hugo Boss dressed a robot as a guest. Noetix dressed a robot as a model. The next step, robots as genuine fashion consumers, purchasing and wearing clothing as part of their commercial deployment, is not far away.
For the designers, brands, and startups now building clothing for robots, these fashion week appearances are not just historical curiosities. They are proof of concept. Every Spot dog that held a handbag, every Sophia that sat front row, every N2 that walked a catwalk wearing vintage has made the idea of robot fashion a little more real, a little more normal, and a little closer to becoming an industry.
The runway, it turns out, is exactly where the future of robot fashion begins.