Unitree Robots Walk Vogue World Milan Runway, Drawing Criticism of Tech Ties

The robots appeared during a segment titled The Age of Intelligence at the Galleria, moving to Gigi D'Agostino's "L'Amour Toujours." They waved their arms and urged onlookers to clap. One performed a lasso motion. They wore no clothes. The pained expression of Alessandro Michele, creative director of Valentino, quickly went viral, TechCrunch reported.

Vogue World is the magazine's annual traveling spectacle, now in its fifth year. It combines a runway show, celebrity showcase, variety hour and advertising opportunity, and has been staged in New York, London, Paris and Hollywood. Milan's edition was marketed as a tribute to Italian craftsmanship and "the human touch" in an age of technology. TechCrunch said the robot segment made that framing seem strange.

TechCrunch said it had not seen a single thing about the actual fashion presented at Vogue World Milan, while everyone was talking about the robots. The same robots have made headlines worldwide for their dance moves and for falling and breaking. Similar robots appeared on the runway at London Fashion Week, which is happening now.

Vogue announced earlier this year that the next edition would be in San Francisco. TechCrunch said the timing was not coincidental, citing Anna Wintour's increasingly close alignment with technology barons. Vogue World Milan was sponsored in part by Meta Glasses, with additional support from OpenAI, according to the report.

The article described the performance as a moment that revealed how thoroughly tech exists in a bubble and how not everyone is happy with the rapid adoption of new technology, or with Vogue cozying up to symbols of the very wealthy technology titans during a cost of living crisis. It also cited AI, mass surveillance, displacement of labor and the energy crisis, all overseen by the same titans, and said that for some, a robot on a runway was further proof of what is going wrong.

TechCrunch quoted a tech founder who wrote on Instagram: "I'm annoyed by the celebrities cheering the whole thing. It's sick and gloom. People are literally losing jobs and livelihoods because of these things. They need to stop encouraging it. What's it even modeling? Headphones?" A fashion reporter friend simply said "No" when asked for thoughts on the robots and Vogue World San Francisco, according to the article.

Jason Johnson, founder of Culture Impact Agency, noted that Vogue has been trying to build a relationship with Silicon Valley for at least the past decade, highlighting when Jony Ive co-hosted the Met Gala in 2015. He said the dancing robots at Vogue World Milan were inevitable, as were Vogue World San Francisco and Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, getting the splashy Vogue wedding cover and co-hosting the 2026 Met Gala. "Publications are figuring out new ways to make money and tech has money," he told TechCrunch. "Vogue has the cultural influence and access that those tech people want." Both sides win in the end, he said.

Still, TechCrunch said something about the way Vogue is going about this feels unnatural.

Muna Ikedionwu, founder of MKEDI, a strategy firm for early-stage startups, said the most interesting thing about the robots was that they do not fully represent the innovation and progress happening in the creative technologist space. "I've seen such incredible examples of engineering and AI being used to influence fashion, being used to influence design and art," she told TechCrunch. She said robots walking down the runway does not even scratch the surface of what is happening at the intersection of fashion and tech.

She pointed to the artist duo AA Murakami, who created Olympian Eileen Gu's dress of bubbles at this year's Met Gala. Ikedionwu said they are fashion designers but also engineers, and noted a presentation they recently gave about how to create an "everlasting bubble." She said they are helping pioneer "ephemeral technology," which she described as technology and innovation that speaks to the ephemeral nature or temporariness of art and humanity and the soul.

TechCrunch's writer said that compared with that, the robots seemed quite boring. The writer said that whenever thinking about the intersection of fashion and technology, the Spring 2024 Schiaparelli collection comes to mind, which unveiled a robot baby crafted with Swarovski crystals and a dress made with vintage tech like PC microchips. The writer once threatened to wear that dress to Disrupt.

Ikedionwu wondered whether the robot performance was a way to make the general public more comfortable with technology and fashion overlapping, a merger that has been underway behind the scenes for years. If so, TechCrunch said, it did not work.