MANEL TORRES
Science and fashion have always run in parallel. We just don't always think of it that way.
Manel Torres - Managing Director and founder of Fabrican Limited.
"You stay very still. Or you break the fibres," whispers Manel Torres as he sprays carefully over one of the most photographed bodies of all time. "She was a little nervous about showing too much, and I said, you won't."
Words by Sabrina Ciauri and Sophia Forster. Portrait by Andrew Rankin.
Standing on the runway vulnerable, almost naked in a bluish white light she awaited while this groundbreaking technology came to life, to take shape and formation on her body across 10 minutes. There was a moment you don't see in the video where Manel gave her the instruction to remain very still. "She started moving her legs", Manel recalled, "and I said, 'Bella, what did I tell you?' And she reached up and touched my beard, like this." (laughs) "She said, 'We'll talk mentally.'" - her way of promising that, since she couldn't move or speak, they'd communicate telepathically instead. "She was wonderful. Very free-spirited." There was no rehearsal. The first time was meticulously done live on the runway for Coperni's Spring Summer 2023 show in Paris's Musée des Arts et Métiers.
From training to becoming a fashion designer to gradually spending most of his time in a laboratory, Manel Torres has devoted his career to the creation of Fabrican. The journey of this instant sprayable fabric, a truly innovative technology, began at the Royal College of Art. At the time, during his postgraduate fashion studies, Manel found the conventional methods of working with fabric to be a lengthy process and interested in a future where the standard approach is reworked, the idea of Fabrican came into existence. His new-found vision of the creation of an instant non-woven material became an immediate calling, despite many students and professors commenting on the impossible nature of such an idea. Manel stayed dedicated, “Well, guys, after my brain convinced itself, now you’re telling me not to do it? It makes you want to do it more.” This commitment prevailed at Imperial College, where he began to pursue a greater understanding of science and chemistry, grasping at the intricacies of fiber technology and aerosol mechanics.
Fashion and science were never separated disciplines in Manel’s eyes, making his journey that much more compelling through this rare crossover. This incredible combination of two worlds was reflected in his early 2010 fashion show at Imperial College titled Beautiful Science. Despite remarks that staging a fashion exhibition would be unlikely by circumstance, Manel continued to test the limits of Fabrican, stating “I think it’s always about making your dreams a reality”. This deep commitment to his craft has only continued to grow, eventually stepping into the larger public eye through the Coperni Spring Summer 2023 Paris fashion show. The immediately viral eight minutes shook the crowd, designers and the fashion world. Manel comments “Even Coperni didn’t expect what happened. They took a chance.”
What no one could have anticipated was the scale of what followed. Manel reflects on it now, "I think the key is that we had just come out of COVID," he says. "It was one of those moments that fashion needed a celebration." Manel explained that Paris, as the capital of couture, was the right city, the right room, the right moment. When you're inside it, when you are spraying, you're not aware. It was only afterwards, being able to watch it travel across the world in hours on social media, that two decades of work landed at once. Coperni provided Fabrican with a world stage.
The fabric itself is a liquid, comprising natural and synthetic fibres suspended in a solvent that evaporates on contact with skin. It can feel like a suede, rubber, paper - it entirely depends on the formulation chosen. "It's the same as designing a dress," Torres explains. "If you want something very flowy, you use a different fabric than if you want structure." Each application has its own chemistry, similar to that of a pattern behind every dress. The formulation used for the Bella Hadid dress was created during some of the darkest weeks in recent British memory, while crowds gathered to queue for the Queen's lying-in-state, Manel was in the lab mixing and testing in preparation to send the material to Paris in time for the show.
Fabrican's purpose has now extended beyond fashion. Manel has developed instant spray-on fibres designed specifically for the hair roots, providing volume and thickness. Any type of research always leads to new ideas, and the lessons learned from this work have since contributed directly to a new spray-on wound dressing for bandages engineered to adhere to skin directly for more than 24 hours, moulding to human form in a way traditional dressings and bandages currently cannot. It is also being used in the automotive world, as Manel created transparent sprays that create more volume and texture to car interiors. The key design idea allows for the material to be sprayed onto seat foam or other structural bases such as 3D models to form an aesthetic interior without the use of conventional sewing. Interestingly this method can extend into furniture design, establishing a whole new scope of possibilities for the interior design industry to work with.
Another factory has been working with the liquid to produce leather-like products, attaching zips with spray and embossing logos directly into the material. "When you spray by hand, some areas will be thicker, some thinner," Manel explains. "The more professional you are, the more refined the result." The fashion industry itself has been slower to commit. "They want to work with us," he says, "but they don't always have the structure to take it on. They tend to move quickly and invest less in R&D." Sportswear companies are a particularly natural fit, as they tend to have a "more new-materials mentality" and in theory, Fabrican could allow for immediate on-body production, creating compression-style tops perfectly tailored to an athlete's form and personal preferences, later dissolved and resprayed, eliminating pattern waste entirely.
The mainstream barrier is less about the technology itself and more about the actual scale of what a transition would require. "It's not about the technology," Manel insists. "It's that we already have an established way of manufacturing, and transitioning requires different skills and different equipment. Instead of ladies sewing, you'd have operators using spray guns." With robotics, which he believes will be "the next major wave after AI," that shift becomes far more plausible: "You'll have robots spraying 24 hours a day, with more precision and lower labour costs. And companies that want to produce locally and sustainably could do exactly that."
He even imagines a future in which the fabric dissolves back into liquid to be resprayed. Instead of throwing away a worn pair of trainers, you send them back, the material is dissolved, and the process starts again. "The raw material stays in circulation indefinitely," he says. "I think every industry could eventually apply this." It already exists: "We can do it, in the lab. Not yet in industry." As always, the industry will take longer to catch up.
Beyond any single application, what Manel would really like to build towards is the next generation of people who can carry this forward. His dream is a dual postgraduate programme between Imperial College and the Royal College of Art, "equally balanced," producing scientists who understand fashion and designers who understand chemistry. "Once you have those people," he says, "the possibilities are infinite." Multilayered spray fabrics, robotic application, "things we can't even imagine yet."
It is a new scientific form of craft, a sprayed liquid couture two decades in the making, and still, as Manel would say, only the beginning of what those infinite possibilities might hold.
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