Hi-Tech Chic. Coperni SS24

October 1, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Coperni stands for blending the fascination for technology with contemporary garment design. Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant dialed down on another big noise moment, focusing on the clothes. Almost. The hi-tech came first, via flat speakers by Transparent, integrated into an opening leather jacket, a men’s sleeveless T-shirt, and other pieces. Many of the models wore small devices on their chest: these were produced by a start-up named Humane and called AI Pins: apparently when released very soon they will “enable contextual and ambient computer interactions”. But even without all these developments, this was a decent, thorougly-considered line-up. A white lace-detailed dress was strewn with 3D printed “flowers” that were generated by cymatic production. A skirt in metallic herringbone was meant to mimic the casing of an old-school microphone. The collection found its eye-catchiest tempo when contemplating older technologies. Vaillant asserted “the triangle is the smallest instrument and makes the loudest noise” in the orchestra: the insertion of triangles into the backs of jackets and the necks and waistlines of evening dresses was immediately arresting. Brass was represented by a trumpet-bodiced dress, and near to the close came a resoundingly volumed black dress.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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The Wolf And The Lamb. Coperni AW23

March 6, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

The Coperni guys seem to have perfected the art of a viral fashion moment. After last season’s finale dress that was sprayed over Bella Hadid’s body, for autumn-winter 2023 we had a pack of robotic wolves – Boston Dynamics canines – violently undressing Rianne Van Rompaey from a blanket wrap. The thing about these viral moments is that the moment they stop flooding social media, they aren’t really expanded by Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant any further. The “spray” technology wasn’t actually used in the production of Coperni’s summer collection, while the unsettling performance we’ve seen in their latest outing in general felt flat after a second thought. What else makes me quite skeptic about the label’s “new” approach, not only in its bold use of technology, is its inspiration with Alexander McQueen. The new collection seemed to be referencing a number of McQueens show – the infamous “Highland Rape”, for instance, oozed from the ragged lining of Coperni’s dresses, just like the red tights and even the hair styling. Ok, lets move on. What all of that actually meant? The creative duo leaned into their model of shaping shows around a futuristic mise en scene by recruiting the cyber-canines to play their part in an updated retelling of French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine’s The Wolf and The Lamb. Said Vaillant: “It’s a beautiful story that talks about the balance of power between different groups. Instead of the wolf and the lamb we reinterpreted it as humans and robots.” Glossing over the fact that De la Fontaine’s original is actually a pretty brutal demonstration of the relationship between force and self-justification, this was an interesting literary device for the show. The collection featured a loose underlying riff on Red Riding Hood. The models walked out in inverted collar capelets in black and tweed before we saw looks featuring adapted versions of Gustave Doré’s illustration of the fable, featuring a robo-dog instead of the wolf, and leather trousers fringed in low-grade off-cut leather skirts. There was a pivot into emoji-based pieces: a real-life handbag shaped after the messaging equivalent, and gathered dresses pinched by appreciative hands. Yet again, the big concept overshadowed the designers’ clothes. And these guys actually know how to make great clothes, so it’s a pity.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Femme. Coperni SS23

October 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Coperni‘s spectacular – and wildly viral – spring-summer 2023 finale could easily be a separate fashion show in its own right. The whole process lasted around seven minutes. Bella Hadid came out in her underwear, arm across her bosom, and stood on an underlit platform. What followed was down, Arnaud Vaillant said, to “our little geek” Sebastien Meyer’s specific obsession with cutting edge technology. A scientist Meyer had befriended named Dr. Manel Torres came out with a colleague and proceeded to spray the near-naked Hadid from neckline to mid-calf with a white substance that looked a bit like spray snow. When it hit her skin it had the sheen of liquid, but in the few minutes of its application it became matte. The smell, strong and synthetic, filled the Musée des Arts et Métiers’ Salle des Textiles. Hadid kept her poise during the spray-down, before one of Meyer and Vaillant’s colleagues came out and spent a minute cutting at the hem and tugging at the shoulder of the layer of who-knows-what that covered the model. And then Hadid walked the runway in a pure white dress – perfectly fitted – hat until five minutes ago had been liquid in a bottle: fashion alchemy. The final look apart, the rest of the “Femme” collection felt rather plain and flat. Highlights had included dresses made in a thousand pieces of embroidered glass that tinkled uproariously, like a recycling truck driven by an amphetamine-addled getaway driver. Other dresses came in panels connected by a sort of brutal metal suture. There was a solid gold version of the designers’ Swipe bag which – all 1kg of it – will be melted down after the show. It was created by an artisan goldsmith named Gabriele Veneri in Italy, and was accompanied by a considerable security retinue. No one got a clue what was the point behind it, expect for another “viral” moment. In the next seasons, the Coperni boys should definitely focus on their new, hi-tech patent for making a dress – or any other piece of clothing – and try making it the future of fashion.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Très Cool. Coperni AW22

March 4, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Coperni ate it up this season! This is definitely my favourite collection coming from Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer‘s Parisian label so far. The hoodie-lapelled blazers, overcoats and fleeces that you see Coperni’s It-model cast wearing so coolly here represented a challenging design brief for Vaillant and Meyer’s tailoring atelier to achieve: they had to look good worn both up and down. As Vaillant showed on his phone pre-show, the women of that atelier – named Cap Est Sarl – sent the designers pictures of themselves wearing the prototypes as that development progressed towards runway-readiness in the last few weeks. “They are so cute, always trying the pieces before sending them – I love them,” said Meyer. Added Vaillant: “They are in Ukraine, in Kyiv: we hadn’t heard from them for a few days. They are safe for now. And we dedicate this collection to them.”

This show placed this collection within the pressure cooker arena in which the insecure adolescent chrysalis is forged into the self-aware young adult butterfly: high school. On a runway framed by school lockers and to an excellent faux-radio broadcast of upbeat disaffection the models first emerged as laconically withdrawn, cloistered in those hooded pieces of generically reinvented tailoring. These did indeed work with the hood/lapel worn back off the head. Other cleverly twisted takes on tailoring were the disassembled jacket crop tops and miniskirts and a twist-fronted Le Smoking jacket with cut outs at the midriff whose construction translated finely into menswear fleeces and trench coats. A waistcoat, sometimes cut in a crystal pinstripe, also incorporated a hood that came with cute little Batman ears. Aran knit short-sleeved bodies featuring that hood and a circular cutout at the back were eccentric takes on a preppy knitwear mafia staple. Jeans and leather pants that were worn as gaiters cut to just above the knee were a funny riff on low-waistband rebellion. Upcycled Adidas Gazelles and zip-decorated pumps aside, notable footwear included chisel toed articulated soled derbies whose vectored shape was inspired by the Tesla Cybertruck prototype. Coperni’s emblematic Swipe bag appeared in blown glass: calamity was avoided when the model carrying it caught her heel on the runway and pitched forward before pulling off a graceful recovery. We shifted towards the big butterfly-emerges moment – prom night, of course – via a grungily pretty asymmetric dress in white French velvet worn with those Adidas, and a super clever minidress made entirely of upcycled ties. Prom queen candidate gowns substituted tulle for rose strewn latex and a dancefloor’s worth of who’s-sorry-now sheer minidresses. This was an extremely witty collection that was very cleverly conceived by the designers – and wonderfully cut by those Kyiv craftswomen.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Summer 2033. Coperni SS22

October 1, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

Coperni’s Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer named their latest collection “Spring Summer 2033”. As Vaillant observed, “The industry is a nightmare now. But we want to escape and have fun.” By setting their collection not next season but next decade they were at least acknowledging the issues of now while simultaneously evading them. In the middle of the runway was a literal field of hemp, which was related to a sustainable fabric initiative in which the designers are involved. Through these plants Coperni’s 2033 crew walked a sand runway as if, perhaps, making their way down through the dunes to a beach bar like the mighty Sa Trinxa in Ibiza, an island the designers said was a contender for this collection’s imagined location. Tailoring in a beachy environment is often as incongruous as boardshorts in a boardroom, but here Vaillant and Meyer applied this pillar of their work in way that blurred its inherent formality, both through their ingenious deconstructions of the tailoring itself – as in a jacket sliced vertically away above the armpit and suspended on the body by an acetate chain halter neck – as well as the pieces they placed against it. A print collage that included images of Felix the Cat, the yin and yang sign, alien faces and Beavis and Butt-Head was like some ’90s dropout scrapbook. It was used on camp shirts for men and a slip dress hemmed with three layers of the whorled, vaguely molluscoid edging detail that recurred on bra-tops and skirts. A swirly, vaguely psychedelic print was applied to the swimwear and shirting that punctuated much of the first, twistedly conventional section of the show. As we edged to evening, certain pieces began to shimmer a little on the eye – thanks to the treatment given to French lace worn as pants against a bra-top of Indian seashells or another slip dress. This heritage-rooted futurism was true to their Ghesquière-mentored roots, and repeated in a new bag whose shape was inspired by the iPhone photos app icon, named the Origami. This is a collection for the hot lovers from the future.