For Vanessa Sanchez, your sweater is an engineering problem

Scientists often work with models, but not this kind. In 2025, during an interdisciplinary science conference at Tohoku University in Japan, the conference organizers put on a fashion show.

Vanessa Sanchez, a professor in Rice University’s mechanical engineering department, brought a skirt, a top, and accessories for the show that she’d designed and constructed. The organizers arranged for fashion models, adorned with professional hair and makeup, to wear her designs. Among the guests of the show were employees of the Japanese fashion brand, Issey Miyake, who sat amongst the mathematicians and scientists attending the conference.

“I didn’t realize they would actually come,” says Sanchez, of the Issey Miyake cohort. “Yeah, that was kind of intimidating.”

But Sanchez’s interests have long straddled the intersection of science and fashion. A native of Long Island, she first developed an interest in sewing as a child watching her mother’s quilting hobby. She also enjoyed dismantling machines, such as her video game console. In 2011, her love of sewing led her to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she learned how to design collections and create clothing patterns. “You're drawing everything out and drafting, using rulers and algorithms,” she says.

But she wanted a deeper understanding of the materials she was using. After a year at FIT, she transferred to Cornell University’s Fiber Science program. There, the curriculum involved chemistry, such as studying dyes, as well as learning analysis methods of different fibers and fabrics. After graduating, she began researching wearable devices and soft robotics, many with applications in healthcare, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard and later a postdoc at Stanford. In one example, she and her colleagues made a jacket that could lift its hood without the use of electronics.

In 2024, Sanchez began building her lab at Rice University. Her work centers on textiles: yarns, threads, and “collections of fibers that are structured in some way,” she says.

Sanchez’s research aims to innovate clothing in both practical and aesthetic ways. One avenue of research is to develop clothing that could assist wearers with disabilities. She imagines a future clothing that offers “fall prevention” for someone with limited strength, or clothing whose style morphs at the press of a button. These are futuristic projects, she concedes, but her driving research questions ask, “How do we get there?”

Today, Sanchez’s lab boasts technology spanning more than seven decades of the clothing industry, including multiple looms, knitting machines that require manual operation, and two automated industrial knitting machines that create designs from computer programs.

It takes the machine about four or five hours to knit a sweater, says Emilia Mann, a second-year Ph.D. student in Sanchez’s group. Using the machine is not unlike submitting a job to a computing cluster. “We don't really like to just leave it in case something goes wrong, but you could, in theory, just let it knit overnight,” she says.

Mann is motivated to study knitted fabrics from a sustainability angle. “In traditional cut and sew, you’re creating a lot of scraps,” she says. She shows a sweater they made in the lab to illustrate one recent sustainability innovation — making sweaters from a single yarn rather than stitching them together from multiple pieces.

The research may feel intuitive, like putting a sweater on in the morning. But the science of textiles is deceptively complex. “I feel like there's a misconception that it's simple,” says Mann. Mann comes from a similar interdisciplinary background to Sanchez, having earned a dual degree in material engineering and apparel design.

One enduring question is how to accurately model the mechanical properties of textiles. Knits, for example, are a “hierarchical” material, says Sanchez. A knit sweater is made of micron-scale fibers twisted into yarns, then looped together into knit stitches. With different stitch arrangements, you can create materials of different mechanical properties, including elasticity. “The mechanics can be very complex because you have a lot of friction and contact,” says Sanchez. “Yarns are compressible, and fibers can move and slide around.”

For some lab members, the field’s ties to physics run deep. Mann’s grandmother, Masako Kinoshita, who studied physics, spent decades investigating decorative braids known as kumihimo used as lacings for samurai armor and Buddhist sutras. “She used physics [and mathematics] to back-engineer how they were made because it was a lost art,” says Mann.

Interdisciplinary advances have also injected new inspiration. Recently, Sanchez attended a talk on cyanobacteria, which form microscopic thread-like structures with analogies to textiles. “There's some really clever methods that I'm wondering if we can translate to yarns,” says Sanchez. “[I’m] realizing like, oh wow, you have similar problems. We’re not alone.”