Fashion Brands Are About to Discover Their Next Growth Market: Dressing Humanoid Robots
· Thought Catalog
Updated 57 minutes ago, May 26, 2026
Robots need clothes for the same reason humans do, how they’re dressed changes how people feel about them.
A humanoid in exposed metal reads as cold industrial machinery. The same machine in a tailored concierge uniform reads as helpful, calm, and premium. Hotels, hospitals, retail floors, and restaurants are the first big buyers, and they already dress their human staff to match their brand. They will want the robots to match too.
Clothing also solves real engineering problems. Soft textile layers muffle motor noise, add safety padding around joints, protect tactile sensors and electronic skin, manage heat, and survive repeated cleaning in places like hospitals. A bare metal robot in a living room or a maternity ward is a problem. A dressed one isn’t.
Jensen Huang, who runs NVIDIA, laid out the business case on Joe Rogan’s podcast in December 2025. People will want their robot to look different from yours, so a clothing industry forms to make that happen. Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure AI, made the same call this month, predicting luxury labels, smart fabrics, seasonal drops, and matching outfits for a person and their robot.
The startups are already here. RobotsWear is building modular clothing tailored to robot anatomy, with sensor-compatible fabrics, temperature regulation, and uniforms aimed at homes, hospitals, and hospitality. OIDFIT is taking pre-orders for protective, personalized humanoid apparel. Japan’s Rocket Road has been making fashion for robots since around 2021.
The robot makers aren’t waiting either. 1X Technologies ships its home robot NEO Gamma in a 3D-knitted nylon bodysuit and shoes that muffle noise, add safety padding, and let it blend into a living room instead of a factory. Figure’s newest model, Figure 03, uses removable, washable textile outer layers instead of hard plastic shells, designed with fashion designer Janis Sne, with cut-resistant versions for industrial work.
It has already walked a runway, more than once. The 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing opened in August with a human-machine show called Celestial Couture, featuring 12 custom robot costumes directed by Yu Yimeng, a lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Unitree’s G1 modeled custom looks at Shanghai Fashion Week. Noetix Robotics’ N2 walked Paris Fashion Week in a vintage waistcoat and pearls. Seoul hosted its own Robot Fashion Show in October 2025 alongside the IEEE Humanoids conference.
Academic work is catching up. A 2026 framework called the Robot Fashion Psychology Model, developed by Irvin Steve Cardenas and colleagues and presented at HRI 2026, formalizes how clothing shapes trust and perception of robots. It builds on a 2021 paper, “What Robots Need From Clothing,” and warns about “trust-washing,” using friendly design to mask what a robot can and cannot actually do.
The math is the part to be careful about. The overall humanoid robot market is projected to reach roughly $181.9 billion by 2035, with real machines already heading into service roles: Figure, Tesla’s Optimus, Agility’s Digit, Apptronik’s Apollo, and Unitree’s G1. The clothing slice on top of that is a high-margin recurring play, because one expensive robot can wear many outfits across its working life, the way a phone gets a new case or a car gets customized.