Spray-on clothes make a splash

The pair, Manel Torres and Paul Luckham, are perfecting a fabric that can be sprayed onto skin and other surfaces to make clothes, medical bandages and even upholstery.

Torres, a visiting academic at Imperial College London, approached Luckham, an Imperial College professor of particle technology, to help him realise his dream of a spray-on garment that can be taken off, washed and worn again.

“Couture these days is almost dying,” Torres said. “I think here we have a good way of creating instant clothing — that is not very expensive.”

Torres demonstrated the process in a lab at Imperial College, spraying a T-shirt onto a model in a matter of minutes. An experience the model described as “nice, actually.”

The system uses short fibres, such as wool, linen or acrylic, mixed with polymers to bind them together. A solvent which evaporates on contact with a surface allows the fibres to be sprayed out of can as a liquid.

The spray can be applied using an aerosol can or high pressure spray gun and the texture can be varied by changing the fibres.