Cameron Hughes’ designs move as if they each have a mind of their own. On one dress, purple feathers rise and lower like a bird’s ruffled feathers. On another, a swarm of robotic butterflies flap their wings. Still another features spinning tubes of fabric that transform a skirt from pink to blue and back again. The 29-year-old New Yorker makes high-tech couture, and celebrities including Doja Cat, Charli XCX, and Gigi Hadid have all worn his pieces.
Hughes’ originality means he’s often creating his own techniques that blend fashion design with industrial design and computer engineering. “There is nowhere to learn from, for some of it,” Hughes says. “It’s just a lot of experimenting and trial and error. And it can be really, really time consuming to get something to work.”
Hughes has no formal training in fashion design or in robotics. He studied sculpture at Syracuse University, and only after leaving school and working as a product designer did he discover his knack for combining tech and couture. “I’ve taught myself pretty much everything I know,” Hughes says. “I want to get something done, I’m gonna figure out how to do it.”
Hughes’ current project, for now dubbed “the petal dress,” calls to mind a ballerina of the future. Servo-controlled “petals” encased in shimmering teal fabric move up, down, and side-to-side from the hips like a high-tech tutu, creating a mesmerizing motion Hughes’ fans have affectionately likened to the nostalgic Sky Dancer dolls of the ’90s. Hughes started working on the garment last summer, and now, it’s finally almost complete.
The petal dress uses motors Hughes originally bought for a piece he made for Charli XCX, as seen in her music video for “Used To Know Me.” In the video, a crest of feathers swishes back and forth behind the singer’s head. To conceive the design, he pulled from references, including Thierry Mugler’s iconic “Birth of Venus” Dress (famously worn by Cardi B to the 2019 Grammy Awards) and Lady Gaga’s “Living Dress” from her Monster Ball Tour.
Creating a wild concept is one thing. Executing it is quite another. “That’s where my industrial design background comes into play quite a bit,” he says. His designs often stem from the motion he’s trying to create, rather than the final look of the clothes, which means Hughes first has to find the right combination of motors and programming to achieve his desired movement.
He then has to disguise the robotics and integrate them into the clothing. To do so, Hughes has mastered the art of enclosing servo motors. For the petal dress, he 3D printed, sanded and repainted silver hinges, then carefully molded them on the mannequin to accentuate the wearer’s waist rather than distract from the design. “I spent so much time getting [the enclosures] as small as possible, and then getting them to look right on the form,” Hughes says. “They’re a work of art on their own.”
Despite the scale and challenge of his pieces, Hughes is a one-man operation. “Every single stitch, every line of code, I’m doing by myself,” Hughes says. “That’s why it took me five months to make [the petal] dress.” He makes all of his creations in his studio apartment—something he’d like to change in the future as he moves from building an audience to building a brand. “My whole goal the past year was just to build a following and do crazy stuff that no one’s ever done before,” Hughes says. “But I think it’s really time that I make stuff that’s more manufacturable, more wearable, and see what I can do with that.”
Though Hughes says he’d love to create a couture collection someday with a crazy runway show to match, his long-term goal is to build an engineering company attached to his fashion brand and move into the ready-to-wear space with innovative manufacturing technology like 3D knitting, along with new techniques, like automated garment construction, that don’t yet exist. (He hopes to invent some himself.)
Until then, Hughes will keep pushing the limits of design, blending couture, coding, and construction. “I think it’s all art, just using a different medium,” he says. “It’s figuring out how to manipulate certain things to fit on a body rather than an object.”
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