Paris Fashion Week is no stranger to stunts. There was Coperni spray on dress to model in 2022, followed by Schiaparelli artificial animal heads a year later, and then splattered with Robert Woon's blood.”couture horror” last year.
This week's event in the City of Light took the form of Chinese humanoid robot N2, created by Beijing-based Noetix Robotics, lumbering down the runway dressed in a vest and pearls in a first-of-its-kind outing outside of China.
“Humanoid robots look like people,” Noetix CEO Jiang Zheyuan told TIME. “So perhaps new sparks can be created through collaborations with the fashion world.”
Unfortunately, N2's turn came after the official Paris Fashion Week closed as a planned collaboration with a Chinese designer fell apart at the 11th hour due to a funding dispute. Instead, N2 limited himself to modeling three outfits purchased from a local vintage store at the popular UNESCO site in front of the assembled press, while also captivating onlookers with street acrobatics.
However, the N2's debut in Paris is another sign of the growing global humanoid robotics industry that Morgan Stanley predicts could be worth $5 trillion by 2050. Of course, N2 is far from the first robot to be involved in fashion. Back in 1999, Alexander McQueen introduced industrial robotic arms. spray painting runway model, and 10 years later Tokyo Fashion Week was posted a black-haired female robot named HRP-4C. Coperni has robot dogs in 2023 galloping with human models, and Shanghai Fashion Week is already debuted humanoid robots on the runway in March.
That Shanghai, the “Paris of the East,” adopted the original is of course not surprising. While the West has humanoid robotics players such as Boston Dynamics and Tesla, China is at the forefront of the industry thanks to its huge market, mature industrial base of chips, sensors and batteries, and strong government support.
In March China made public a one trillion yuan ($137 billion) fund to support transformative technologies including artificial intelligence and robotics. Cities and regions in China are also racing to find a local robotics champion through a flood of grants and subsidies. Last year, 31 Chinese companies introduced 36 humanoid models, but only eight from their American counterparts.
And while the N2 Paris Walk seems like just another gimmick at first glance—at 3ft 9in, she's definitely not blessed with your typical model physique—it's also an exercise that can provide concrete benefits. A major challenge for the development of humanoid robotics is determining the real-world use. While they dazzle with their social media performances turns over, run a half marathon, dancing, boxingand play footballin terms of performing everyday tasks that are actually useful, they still pale in comparison to their breathing and sweating cousins.
One of the key reasons is the lack of data. Although major language models such as ChatGPT or DeepSeek have made giant leaps in analyzing vast amounts of online information, virtually all of it is “2D” data: words, numbers, images and sounds. By comparison, the “3D” data needed to teach humanoid robots how to move and respond to stimuli in the real world (known as “embodied artificial intelligence platforms”) is extremely sparse.
“If you want a so-called artificially intelligent humanoid robot that actually moves like us, it would require scenario training and real-life data,” says Grace Shao, a former Alibaba manager turned information technology consultant who publishes Do you have a PM? newsletter. “So this is a huge bottleneck for the industry.”
The race to dominate the humanoid robotics market is as much about collecting 3D data as it is about sharpening the nuts and bolts. Last year, Shanghai authorities gave local firm AgiBot a free data collection facility in which 100 robots will perform routine tasks such as stacking shelves, folding clothes and pouring tea for 17 hours every day. However, it would be much faster and more cost-effective to collect this data organically through industrialization, continually improving processes while generating the revenues needed to drive economies of scale.
Could fashion be the answer? So says Chinese technical consultant Emma Meng. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in French literature, Maine worked as an assistant to the publisher of a New York fashion magazine – “just like The Devil Wears Prada!” she laughs while moonlighting as a fit model, earning $1,000 a day to essentially attach pieces of fabric to herself and move her limbs to identify pinch points and gauge aesthetic flow.
Meng's experience at the intersection of fashion and technology led her to bring Noetix to Paris. She believes clothing is an ideal industry for mass adoption of robots, be it more cost-effective models or dynamic mannequins that better display clothing in retail stores. The main reason, she said, is that fashion houses love eye-catching gimmicks and have money to spend, as evidenced by the $88.3 billion in revenue posted last year by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
“They're willing to spend a lot of money just to get people's attention,” Meng says. “So it would be nice if they could commercialize these first-generation robots, even though they can only do flashy but rather useless things.”
Case in point: the N2 can excel at inversions, but struggles with stairs, limiting the N2 to single-level walks in Paris. Merrill Lynch estimates that the quirk illustrates why, despite all the hype, global shipments of humanoid robots will only reach 18,000 units in 2025. (Noetix hopes to sell just 1,000 units this year.)
Compared to the 6.1 billion smartphone connections worldwide, that's a tiny amount of data, especially considering it's spread across multiple competing companies. Speaking at the Beyond Expo technology conference in Macau in May, Michael Tam, chief brand officer at Shenzhen-based robotics company UBtech, admitted that mass adoption of the technology could take 20 years. Thus, the race continues to employ these budding butlers, maids and models.
Of course, China sees this as an opportunity. “In Beijing, the government asked us to create a runway-walking robot that would be used in the fashion industry,” Jiang says.
However, Shao is not so convinced that modeling will provide the necessary data quality for the next leap in development. “For a mannequin, you can easily program five poses, or the same for a runway show,” says Shao. “I just don't think it's really that smart.”
Derek Zoolander would certainly disagree. But it remains to be seen whether N2's runway arrival will spark another fashion craze or fall apart at the seams.
