Bella Hadid's Spray-On Dress
January 30, 2025 5:56 AM   Subscribe

Coperni's Spring/Summer 2023 show during Paris Fashion Week featured model Bella Hadid being clothed onstage with a spray-on dress. posted by Lemkin (39 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is like the intro to a mesothelioma lawyer commercial.
posted by mittens at 6:05 AM on January 30 [31 favorites]


Stanislaw Lem, Return From the Stars:
With the clothes I had no luck. Of what I knew, almost nothing existed. At any rate, I discovered the secret of those mysterious bottles at the hotel, in the compartment with the sign "Bathrobes." Not only robes of that kind, but suits, socks, sweaters, underwear - everything was sprayed on. I could see how that might appeal to women, because by discharging from a few or a few dozen bottles a liquid that immediately set into fabrics with textures smooth or rough--velvet, fur, or pliable metal--they could have a new creation every time, each for one occasion only. Of course, not every woman did this for herself: there were special plasting salons (so that was what Nais did!), but the tight-fitting fashion that resulted from this did not much appeal to me...

I stood with my arms raised and he set to work, spraying from four bottles at once. The liquid in the air, white like foam, set almost instantaneously. From it arose sweaters of various colors...
posted by Lemkin at 6:06 AM on January 30 [12 favorites]


A paragraph FTFA, which genuinely impressed me:
Additionally, since Fabrican is plant-based and composed of natural fibers, it can be used as an alternative to animal-derived leathers. The fabric can also be washed and reused and sprayed on to again to extend the garment. Torres hopes to grow Fabrican to an industrial scale with the help of a robotic arm spray system that could quickly create complex forms in a very precise way and operate 24 hours a day, which could significantly reduce human labor and product costs associated with garment production. The durability of the fabric is also something that Torres assures to be “very similar to the clothes we use daily but needs to be improved.” He reveals that he’s currently working with the German government to apply Fabrican technology to produce uniforms.
In my mind, the "fast fashion" companies have linked "fashion" to "waste" so strongly that I just assume now that everything about clothes/design is concentrated on appearance with no thought for sustainability.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:18 AM on January 30 [7 favorites]


This is actually really cool. I may not be a fashion person, but this is pretty dang cool.
posted by Kitteh at 6:41 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


Waiting for my AI-empowered, fabric-spraying Roomba Fashionista model to get me dressed this morning. The cats are hiding somewhere.
posted by cenoxo at 6:42 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


I just noticed how many of the models had been given Hitler hairstyles, which was kind of a downer.

But Hadid really sells this as a performance art thing. Her face has the cold kind of beauty needed to pull it off. Picture Cindy Crawford or Gisele Bundchen up there and it just wouldn’t work right.
posted by Lemkin at 6:51 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


Thanks for sharing this! It was neat to watch and I appreciated the fact that while they had two males spray the dress on they had a female do the final cleaning and cutting of the dress.

I wonder what the texture of the material is like? Is it gritty or smooth?
posted by Art_Pot at 6:57 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


But Hadid really sells this as a performance art thing. Her face has the cold kind of beauty needed to pull it off.

And her physical self-possession was impressive. I have never in life been that self-assured and composed in my body.
posted by Archer25 at 7:50 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


As a person of hirsute persuasion, I don't envy undressing and forcibly dipilating simultaneously.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:06 AM on January 30 [12 favorites]


That’s the sweater version
posted by gottabefunky at 8:32 AM on January 30 [3 favorites]


That was pretty cool. I don't generally care about runway fashion stuff, but I am very glad a woman did the final adjustments. EDIT: what Art_Pot said.
posted by Glinn at 8:49 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


(a) How do you get it back off? Like...is it actual fabric that holds up once it's taken off, or do you rip it like a Christmas present?
(b) Can you ever get back into and rewear the dress again?
(c) Can she actually manage to roll up the dress enough to pee and put it back down?
(d) What is the environmental impact of spray on fabric?
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:12 AM on January 30 [5 favorites]


That's fairly nifty, wonder what the experience is like

And as avowed wearing of things comfortable, how does it feel to wear? And how does it look on a regular schlub's body as opposed to someone who by quirk of genetics and tortuous work has a "flawless" (for certain values of the term) figure?
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:40 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]


Man, Parisian porn is weird.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:52 AM on January 30 [10 favorites]


(Okay, now that my snarky comment is out of the way, to answer people's questions: keep in mind that the point of fashion is to be art and not practical clothing, that the clothes only need to look good long enough to be photographed on a runway, that beauty is subjective and as open to manipulation as any other social construct, and that model work is often grueling and dangerous to the model's health. It's cosplay with rich people budget.)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:52 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


OK it looks like it would be absolutely useless unless you live somewhere hot, and also probably wearing it all day would just make it get gradually baggier and worse-fitting as it starts to shake off the body. How fragile is it? It looks pretty fragile, and sweaty too, like wearing a thin latex glove.

But my biggest gripe? It's so boring.
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 9:56 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


Came to snark about how haute couture seems to have discovered body painting, stayed to say that, yes, it is pretty fascinating, although it does seem to be something more akin to a less-fluffy sort of inedible (presumably) cotton candy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:56 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]


The interview page linked to low-res video of Alexander McQueen's 1999 "No. 13 Finale", in which two robot arms spray paint the model who is on a rotating platform between them. McQueen also had a very y2k electronics inspired lineup that year, which is delightfully retro now.

My unfashionable opinion is that more fashion should involve robots and/or visible circuit board traces.
posted by autopilot at 10:17 AM on January 30 [3 favorites]


Heinlein also had characters wearing spray-on clothes (maybe it was just underwear? Can't recall) in The Puppet Masters (which, unlike the 1994 movie, was set in the future).
posted by Rash at 10:33 AM on January 30 [2 favorites]


When I was a kid and people were even less respectful about women’s bodies, I often read or heard about models, actresses, etc. described as wearing “painted-on” jeans. I took this literally. I believed there must be Hollywood goings-on where ladies could wear nothing but actual paint for pants. Although I really wanted to see what this looked like, it made sense that nobody could put a picture of it in the newspaper. Anyway, that’s exactly what I thought of when I saw this.

It’s a retro-future idea like flying cars—it sounds amazingly convenient from the vantage point of 1960. Paper dresses rode a brief “wave of the future” around then, but they couldn’t move outside of the demographic of very thin young ladies who didn’t sweat much. They eventually settled in the niche of hospital gowns. I suppose this can also find a niche in haute couture or very specialized outfits, such as for the Met Gala or—more practically—biohazard protection.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:35 AM on January 30 [4 favorites]


autopilot > The interview page linked to low-res video of Alexander McQueen's 1999 "No. 13 Finale" , in which two robot arms spray paint the model who is on a rotating platform between them.

It was an interesting watch (albeit with an unpleasant Demon Seed flavor), but there really isn’t that much in common between the two.
posted by Lemkin at 11:18 AM on January 30


Spray on shoes are a joke in the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movie, because of the livability issues others have mentioned above.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:39 AM on January 30


I seem to recall Nike demoing shoes that were just soles that you glued to your feet. I don't think you could actually buy them.
posted by adamrice at 12:32 PM on January 30


The_Vegetables I believe the idea for more general application is for the spray to be applied to molds and produce clothing that's put on by humans in a more ordinary manner.

The thing is, we have a horribly abusive clothing industry because clothing is hard. Cloth is floppy, foldy, stretchy, it's almost designed to be difficult for machines to work with. As a result there's very little that's been automated.

Mosty these days cloth is cut by a machine, and of course there are sewing machiens to do the actual stitching. But otherwise it's human labor. People sort out the pieces of cloth, people align them, people use machines to stitch them together, and that's hard, somewhat dangerous, and generally really poorly paid work.

If you can just spray cloth onto a t-shirt form and get a t-shirt that looks good, is comfortable, and can be washed and reused, then you can liberate millions of people from sweatshop labor.

So far the results aren't so great, the material is looking a LOT better than earlier iterations, which mostly looked like really shaggy felt, but it doesn't look as if it's material that can wear well or be washed and reused so much.

In theory, if recycling was in place and it worked out, for city dwellers you could make the clothes one or two time wear followed by recycling. But I think we all know that the result would be disposal not recycling, so yeah.

Source: I used to do tech work in a place that made clothes and JFC it's a labor intensive process even in a pretty decently run place with (for America) OK wages. And even though the actual fabric cutting was done by a machine, it required human labor to lay the cloth flat, make sure there weren't wrinkles, make sure it was aligned right, etc before the machine could do the cutting.
posted by sotonohito at 12:36 PM on January 30 [7 favorites]


I've seen this piece before, and the McQueen dress/performance still gives me goosebumps. I think this is an almost perfect display of the difference between pure technology (cool but ultimately empty) & art. The McQueen dress is about something, or several things- the beauty of the machines, the idea of fashion as a kind of assault on the body, violence & vulnerability.
posted by velebita at 2:38 PM on January 30 [2 favorites]


I just noticed how many of the models had been given Hitler hairstyles

But hardly any of them follow through by having a single bollock.
posted by biffa at 5:51 PM on January 30 [2 favorites]


For the folks asking what it feels like and how durable it is: I haven't touched this exact material, but based on my experience with similar materials and how it looks at the end of the video as she walks away, I would expect this to have a cottony feeling kind of like a high-end Kleenex tissue or a thin makeup applicator cotton round. At the parts where the material is built up to opacity, I would expect it to be about as durable as a plastic grocery bag (so like, stronger than tissue paper but weaker than typical craft felt). I would not expect it to be possible to put this dress back on after removing it, because it is skin-tight and has little-to-no elasticity, but if you cut it off neatly you could add a fastener like a zipper to put it back on. (Perhaps a tapeless zipper to fit the tech-minimalism vibes?) If you sprayed it onto a garment-shaped form -- that is, something with "wearing ease," meaning that it is not skin-tight -- instead of directly on the body, you'd have a much better shot at re-wearability (but of course it would be less provocative as theatre).

I personally love a good bit of theatre and am generally favorably inclined to the medium of fashion (as opposed to the industry of fashion, which can be harmful in many ways), so I don't mean this comment to come across as justifying the work on the basis of scientific merit -- there's plenty to talk about with respect to the specific design vision, which I have complicated feelings about. But in case anyone is interested in the technical aspects of the work and how it fits into the current landscape of textile manufacturing, here's an overview of why technologies like Fabrican* are interesting from a textile fabrication viewpoint:
This material is an example of a textile that is "nonwoven," which is an unfortunate bit of jargon that means neither woven nor knit; other examples include felt, Tyvek, and respirator filters. Some synthetic nonwovens, such as acrylic felt, are made with heat bonding, in which a bunch of thin synthetic fibers are pressed together with a bit of heat. Other synthetic nonwovens are made with electrospinning, which is a process in which a material which is temporarily liquid (either molten or dissolved in solvent) is squirted through a tiny nozzle with a strong electrical charge toward a surface with the opposite charge. The material solidifes into tiny charged strands in the air, gets attracted to the surface, and forms a mat of overlaid strands. A cool thing about nonwovens generally is that you can make complex shaped surfaces with them, simply by using shaped molds. Those shapes will be reasonably isotropic (instead of having areas with different elasticities and such because of the grain of the fabric and the effects of the seams), they require no additional human effort for the shaping (instead of the high amounts of human labor involved in cut-and-sew, as sotonohito discusses above), and they can have fairly fiddly details. However, with electrospinning, the shaped mold needs to be able to transmit a chunk of high-voltage electricity, e.g. it's probably milled aluminum or something like that, and also there's a bit where you can only make the layers so thick because at some point the newly formed fabric starts acting as too much of an insulator. With heat-bonding, you need two mold surfaces, both of which need to be able to transmit and sink heat, so again probably milled aluminum or whatever. So a non-electrospun/non-heat-bonded sprayed nonwoven gives you a lot more freedom in terms of what you can use as a mold, including of course direct-to-use applications like medical bandages and the dress in this post. Additionally, you get a lot more control over the "local" characteristics of the fabric: you can vary the thickness much more, you can spray different "colors" at different places (and if you can do different colors, you can also do different conductivities...), and you could even embed other materials without needing to care about their heat tolerance or electrical resistance.

*I don't actually know of others quite like it off the top of my head, and their SEO is strong enough that I can't find any on a quick search now. But I feel reasonably certain that there must be others. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the textile industry can be pretty secretive.
posted by #11eaea at 6:38 PM on January 30 [9 favorites]


I recall seeing an earlier video, years ago, with the inventor demonstrating this material.

In that case, he sprayed on a t-shirt. Then, in order to "remove" the t-shirt, he used scissors and simply cut up in the middle of the chest. then you can remove it. To put it back on, the model held the open flaps of the shirt on his chest together, and the inventor simply sprayed a bit more material directly down the middle, as if zipping up a shirt, you might say.

No idea how this would work practically when, say, using a toilet at somebody else's house. Perhaps some mini-scissors and then a mini-sprayer to just re-seal your clothes?
posted by vacapinta at 4:27 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]


No idea how this would work practically when, say, using a toilet at somebody else's house

Time for an exciting new advance in bidet technology!
posted by mittens at 4:36 AM on January 31 [2 favorites]


And her physical self-possession was impressive. I have never in life been that self-assured and composed in my body.

She's been told she's perfect her entire adult life, that absolutely must help.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:56 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]


She's been told she's perfect her entire adult life, that absolutely must help.

Know a lot of models do you? I've known a few and they tend to come across as thin, tall, and mostly invisible people most of the time. I would not take a model's life for any money and your comment comes across as a little callous. Like actors, the vast majority are just grinding to pay the bills.
posted by ginger.beef at 6:17 AM on January 31 [3 favorites]


Yes, I’d imagine that a model is more likely to be insulted (at least for her appearance) every day since age 5 or so, lest she gain an ounce.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:34 AM on January 31 [4 favorites]


I've known a few and they tend to come across as thin, tall, and mostly invisible people most of the time. I would not take a model's life for any money and your comment comes across as a little callous

I've known a few and they come across exactly as one would expect them to - and Bella Hadid has a net worth of $25m, so I think lots of people would switch lives with her to be tall and invisible and paid well, even if you wouldn't.

The part time hustlers are generally pretty appreciative to have a few catalogue photos taken of them and get back to their regular jobs/studies/lives.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:45 AM on January 31 [1 favorite]


all I'm saying is, there are countless ways to not leave a nasty, snarky, critical take in MeFi threads and yet
posted by ginger.beef at 7:54 AM on January 31 [3 favorites]


Know a lot of models do you? I've known a few and they tend to come across as thin, tall, and mostly invisible people most of the time. I would not take a model's life for any money and your comment comes across as a little callous.

I'll be callous as I like regarding millionares, thanks. They don't need defending. She is not grinding to pay the bills! This is Bella Hadid! Of all the things
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:12 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]


(My original comment was not nasty or snarky meant at all as well.
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:15 PM on January 31


My comment intent was to make Archer25 feel better about their self assuredness which is not nasty!)
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:18 PM on January 31


Given the abuse that female actors and models regularly get in their professions, even the rich and powerful ones, it came off either as nasty or incredibly obtuse.
posted by tavella at 2:46 PM on January 31


Well sorry it was misconstrued but you don't have double down on being mean to me when I wasn't being mean to anyone.

It's obtuse AND nasty to say that Bella Hadid has been told she's pretty her whole life and so has probably self assurance in spades? Afraid I don't get it.

Please consider not assuming ill will of me or any other members.

I was being nice to Archer25.

That's all.
posted by tiny frying pan at 3:27 PM on January 31 [1 favorite]


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