Look of the Week: Jenna Ortega’s steel dress has a very human touch
By Leah Dolan, CNN
(CNN) — From a certain handmade $50 million white-gold bra to the latest red carpet look worn by Jenna Ortega, metal couture is everywhere this week.
At first glance, Ortega’s fitted bodice, fringe skirt and W-shaped bustier looked like something you might find hanging in Cher’s closet. But the gown, designed by Elias Matso, was fashioned almost entirely out of hand-cut steel flat and spiral boning — structural components usually found in the guts of a corset or hoop skirt. It looked as if Ortega herself had been magnetized and sent naked into a steel factory.
She wore the dress to the New York film premiere of “Klara and the Sun,” an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel by the same name. In it, Ortega plays an eager and altruistic solar-powered robot, or “Artificial Friend” called Klara. “He’s been holding onto this dress for me and it’s perfect,” Ortega told People magazine of Matso’s design. “It’s very fitting for the film.”
Ortega and her stylist, Enrique Melendez, would have had plenty of options to choose from for this method dressing moment. Luxury fashion — an industry that justifies its price tag through the promise of human craftsmanship — has enjoyed nodding to robots, and in particular fem-bots, for decades. There was Thierry Mugler’s Machinemensch suit from 1995, recently brought out of retirement by Zendaya, named after the revolutionary sculpted robot costume Brigitte Helm wears in Fritz Lang’s seminal 1927 movie “Metropolis.” In 2024, Schiaparelli’s spring couture collection used technological waste salvaged from the 2000’s, from discarded circuit boards to Nokia cell phones. Creative director Daniel Roseberry cheekily likened the electronics to “vintage fabrics.” And then there was the landmark spring 1999 Alexander McQueen show, where automated robotic arms spray-painted model Shalom Harlow’s white dress into oblivion.
Today, tech-fashion is a much more sobering prospect than a fantasy robot suit with exposed butt checks. Meta has collaborated with Kylie Jenner and Ray-Ban to make their controversial AI glasses more aesthetically pleasing, and real robots are closer than ever before to the world of fashion. This summer, Unitree Robotics’ humanoid dancers were meme-ified a million times over when they performed at Vogue World in Milan, with designers such as Miuccia Prada and Alessandro Michele looking particularly disgruntled in the front row. At Shangai Fashion Week earlier this month, Unitree’s robots showed up again — this time modeling wedding dresses on the runway for Chinese brand The Atelier.
For it to work, or at least entice rather than unnerve, tech-fashion has to have an analog element. Roseberry repurposed the outdated materials of an early aughts IT department, while McQueen’s robotic arms were borrowed from a factory where they were used to paint cars — hardly super high-tech advancements threatening species-level extinction. Matso’s gown, too, though resembling a motherboard’s insides, was just dressmaker’s metal. Both the designer and Ortega emphasized the people that put it all together. Matso nodded to the “many blisters, rebuilds, failed trials” and “helping hands.” Ortega put it more simply: “It’s hand-made, human-made, a lot of effort.”
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