Fashion Show Robot History and Where ABB Robots Fit

In September 2026 four Unitree humanoid robots walked the runway at Vogue World 2026: Milano, and many of the people watching were not impressed. The fashion show robot goes back a lot further than that. This post traces it from the car-factory robot arms that spray-painted a dress at the end of Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 1999 show, through the Boston Dynamics Spot robots at Coperni in 2023, to the humanoids of 2026. It also asks where ABB robots, which already paint cars and copy artists' designs onto them, could fit into fashion.

A Unitree G1 humanoid robot at UAV Expo 2024. Unitree humanoids walked the Vogue World runway in Milan in 2026. Photo: Sayanesy / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

How two paint robots stole a McQueen show

McQueen's thirteenth collection, No. 13, drew on the Arts and Crafts movement, which put traditional craftsmanship ahead of machine-made products. The show was staged in Gatliff Warehouse, a disused former bus depot in London where McQueen held several of his shows, and the paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins walked in prosthetic legs carved from ash wood. McQueen said the finale was inspired by High Moon, a 1991 installation by the artist Rebecca Horn. The finale, by contrast, belonged to two machines.

A dress by Alexander McQueen at the Savage Beauty exhibition at the V&A in London, 2015. Photo: Isabell Schulz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Former ballerina Shalom Harlow stood on a rotating platform in a strapless white tulle dress between two robotic arms borrowed from a car manufacturing plant. The arms moved as if waking up, seemed to inspect her, then sprayed her with black and acid yellow paint as she turned. McQueen said it took a week to program their movements, and producer Sam Gainsbury recalled that he wrote the factory precise instructions on how each machine should move, "joint by joint, like spitting cobras." Vogue's retrospective review put it bluntly: "It wasn't a fashion show. It was performance art."

Shalom Harlow, the model sprayed by the robots in McQueen's No. 13 finale, photographed in 2007. Photo: David Shankbone / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Others borrowed the idea. In 2019 the hotelier Ian Schrager opened the Times Square EDITION hotel with an installation in which people in white outfits spun on a platform while robotic arms sprayed them with paint. Spray-on clothing arrived as well. Manel Torres invented Fabrican, a fabric sprayed from a gun or an aerosol can that dries into a non-woven material, during PhD research at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, and founded Fabrican Ltd in 2003. At Paris Fashion Week in 2022, Coperni closed its show by spraying a Fabrican dress onto Bella Hadid, which several commentators called an homage to McQueen.

Bella Hadid on the red carpet at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. In 2022 Coperni sprayed a Fabrican dress onto her at its Paris show. Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Robots on the runway today

Coperni brought real robots the next season. Designers Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant travelled to Boston to meet Boston Dynamics, and in March 2023 they staged their Paris show with five Spot robots striped in yellow and black. One Spot helped a model take off her coat and another carried a model's handbag, while handlers steered the choreography from backstage. The designers called it a modern fable, a retelling of La Fontaine's poem The Wolf and the Lamb as a story about power between humans and robots. After the show, fans crowded round the robots for selfies.

Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot dog, on Centre Stage at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon. Photo: Lukas Schulze / Web Summit via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The 2026 version went down worse. Vogue World, the magazine's travelling show, closed its Milan edition in September with an act called The Age of Intelligence, in which four Unitree humanoids walked through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II among models such as Alex Consani. Creative director Juan Costa Paz told Vogue the robots stood for "the beginning of robotics" and were meant to be fun and terrifying at once. TechCrunch reported that the robots wore no clothes, that the event was sponsored in part by Meta glasses with support from OpenAI, and that similar robots turned up at London Fashion Week.

A humanoid robot and a four-legged robot walk across a stage at the Japan Mobility Show in Tokyo, 2025. Photo: RuinDig / Yuki Uchida / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

We found no ABB robot on a runway, but ABB robots do the kind of work McQueen borrowed from a car plant. In 2022 ABB's IRB 5500 paint robots, fitted with PixelPaint heads that carry 1,000 nozzles, recreated designs by the eight-year-old artist Advait Kolarkar and the Dubai design collective Illusorr on a car in less than 30 minutes, which ABB called the world's first robot-painted art car. PixelPaint applies multi-colour designs without masking, and ABB's RobotStudio software keeps the paint head so close to the body that no paint mists into the air.

The Illusorr design on ABB's robot-painted art car, seen from above in the paint booth, 2022. Photo: ABB

Where fashion show robots go next

TechCrunch suggested the Milan robots may be a preview of next year's Vogue World, which is planned for San Francisco. Milan also showed the limits of robots as props. TechCrunch quoted a tech founder who complained that people were losing jobs and livelihoods to these machines, and quoted a post complaining that everyone was talking about the robots instead of the fashion. Vogue's film for the event, with model Vittoria Ceretti recast as an AI, made a related point: Ceretti said technology can generate ideas and imitate styles, but people bring their own experience and emotion to art.

Model Vittoria Ceretti on the runway at an Alexander McQueen Fall/Winter 2018 show. Photo: Christopher Macsurak / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Any ABB role in fashion is a possibility for now. PixelPaint was built for car bodies, but it shows a robot reproducing an artist's design exactly, and ABB says the point is to meet demand for personalised products; car designer Ian Callum said some of his customers want the whole car designed in a bespoke way. A garment or accessory version would be new engineering, and its programs would be built and tested first in RobotStudio. Our posts on robot painting art and garment sewing automation cover the neighbouring work.

Advait Kolarkar watches an ABB IRB 5500 robot paint his design onto a car with PixelPaint, 2022. Photo: ABB

Most of the open problems involve people. A runway puts models and an audience close to the machines. Coperni's Spots were steered by handlers backstage, and cobots such as ABB's GoFa are built to sense contact and limit their force. Programming takes time: McQueen needed a week to choreograph two arms. Reliability is a cost: the Unitree robots used in Milan had already made headlines for falling and breaking. And the Milan show was billed as a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and the human touch, which is exactly the contrast its critics picked up on.

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

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