Clothing That Dresses You
A team from South Korea’s KAIST and Stanford University has built clothing that puts itself on. No hands. No helper. The garment uses soft, flexible “vines” driven by air pressure, sewn into the fabric itself. Pressurise them, and they glide the cloth up along the wearer’s body like ivy climbing a wall. The person does not even have to stand still.
Key Takeaways
- Air-pressure “vines” embedded in clothing pull the fabric onto the body by turning it inside out as they advance, taking roughly 10 seconds for a full suit.
- The system needs no complex control algorithm and works while the wearer moves, unlike external dressing robots that require the user to stay still.
- Beyond elderly and disabled users, the team targets semiconductor cleanrooms and emergency responders who need protective gear on fast and hands-free.
It Started With Rain and a Bicycle
The idea came from a wet commute. “When I was riding a bicycle, it started to rain … and I thought it would be helpful if a raincoat could be put on automatically (as I ride),” said KAIST postdoctoral researcher Kim Nam Gyun, lead author on the paper.
The mechanism sounds odd until you watch it work. “The vine robot stays close to the person and dresses them by turning the clothing inside out as it moves, allowing it to climb stably along the shape of the body,” Kim said. He put the full-suit time at about 10 seconds.
Growing, Not Crawling
Ryu Jee-Hwan, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at KAIST, explained the borrowed biology. Ivy does not shuffle its whole body forward. It extends at the tip. The robot does the same, which is why it handles curves without falling apart.
“It can pass through narrow gaps, grow while adapting to the shape of its surrounding environment, and move regardless of whether the surface is slippery, sticky, or sloped,” Ryu said.
That property matters more than it sounds. Conventional robot-assisted dressing leans on an external arm plus heavy control software, and it usually asks the person to freeze in place. This design folds the machinery into the garment, so the clothing does the work and the wearer keeps moving.
Where It Could Actually Get Used
Helping older adults and people with disabilities is the obvious first case. Assistive robotics has been circling that need for years, and technology.org has covered efforts ranging from a robot that catches people mid-fall without a harness to full lower-limb exoskeletons. A recurring complaint runs through all of it: people do not want to strap into things. Clothing that dresses itself sidesteps that objection entirely.
The industrial case may arrive first. Semiconductor cleanroom staff climb into protective suits constantly. So do firefighters and medical crews, often under time pressure, often with their hands already occupied. The research group sees room in both.
The work also belongs to a longer thread in soft wearable robotics, where labs use compliant materials rather than rigid frames to work alongside the human body. Ryu made a related point about where attention goes. AI has grown explosively, and the software gets the coverage. His team’s self-dressing robot, he said, shows that mechanical engineering still has to meet software halfway. The same lab has now taken the field’s top paper award two years running.
The study appeared in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, a peer-reviewed journal. The paper, titled “Self-Wearing Adaptive Garments via Soft Robotic Unfurling,” was selected as one of only five winners from more than 1,700 papers published in the journal during 2025, and was written with Professor Allison M. Okamura’s group at Stanford.
Written by Vytautas Valinskas
