Feats of fantasy: This software engineer codes self-twirling and illuminating gowns

Over the past year, Christina Ernst has drawn millions of TikTok views for her whimsical fashion projects that incorporate coding and circuitry. Through She Builds Robots, she hopes to encourage more young women to enter STEM fields.

When Christina Ernst dreamed up the concept for a self-twirling dress, she made it and then programmed its robotic arms to lift the hem of a romantic pink smock gown and to spin it left and right. She turned fantasy into reality with a flickering, faux candle-lined corset top, too, as well as a cathedral gown with stained-glass-like panels that could be illuminated like windows seen at night. Over the past year, the 28-year-old has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers for her whimsical fashion projects that incorporate coding and circuitry. Based in Chicago, when Ernst isn’t working as a software engineer at Google’s West Loop office, she’s home experimenting with what she calls “fashioneering” projects, then documenting each one for her online audience. Through her tutorial website and social media accounts She Builds Robots, she hopes to encourage more young women to enter STEM fields. “When I was growing up, I would have loved to see some sort of tech representation (for) my own interests in fashion, art and drawing,” she told CNN during an interview at Chicago Public Library’s Maker Lab, where Ernst had a 12-week residency, demonstrating how some of her designs worked. “I loved all of these things, but never thought that they had any compatibility with the tech world…It’s really important to me to center (my tutorials) on the interests that a lot of teen girls already have, to meet them where they are.” Ernst often goes for feats of fantasy, with her first viral videos documenting her Medusa dress adorned with several undulating robotic serpents, including one programmed to make eye contact using AI facial recognition. But the “stupidest” thing she’s made with her computer engineering degree — as she declared in her most-watched video — was for one of her Halloween costumes. In it, she shows a small, motorized 3D-printed replica of a familiar foodie rat affixed to a headband, pulling two small handfuls of her hair up and down in its paws as she slices up an onion in the kitchen. To test her version of Remy from “Ratatouille,” she gave the rodent yarn first so it wouldn’t yank her hair out. After seeing the reaction online, with nearly 45 million views to date across Instagram and TikTok, she took some commenters’ advice to upgrade him further. “The first version I made just had his arms going up and down. I coded them to move randomly,” she explained. “And a bunch of people in my comments had a wonderful idea to sync it up to my movements, and I just happened to have (an) accelerometer laying around. It’s a pretty common circuitry piece, so I spent the weekend wiring it up.”