Coperni Femme (Q2194)
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programme of the European Commission
- Global Monitoring for Environment and Security
- GMES
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Coperni Femme |
programme of the European Commission |
|
Statements
Now that was a show. There was naive youth and disaffected youth. There were villains, mermaids, princesses, lightning, fireworks, rats, and Kylie Jenner. For those who dared, the after party included the chance to ride Hyperspace Mountain (epic). When I regretfully exited Disneyland Paris at the stroke of midnight, techno still echoed through the Magic Kingdom. Being part of Fashion Month always feels like inhabiting an alternate (un)reality: this was an extra twist in the wormhole.Backstage in Cinderella’s banquet hall Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant said they had been prepping for this event, the first fashion show ever held at any Disneyland Paris, for two years. Added Vaillant: “When they first approached us it was to do a small collaboration: Sébastien suggested that maybe we could do a show together at some point. We didn’t realize how huge this would become.”Disney really delivered on the partnership. The show was held in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle. At the show’s finale the castle was framed with fireworks, spark-sprays, bolts of lightning and more. It seems churlish to mention the rodents we spotted scampering on the drawbridge just before the show started—“Ratatouille,” shouted one benchmate—but uninvited guests in the house of mouse added to the surreal wonder of the moment.The collection, Coperni’s largest ever, they said, was broadly divided into three narrative sections for the purposes of the show. “We like this idea of fairy tales and the evolution from childhood to adulthood that we can see in the Disney movies in general,” said Vaillant. At the beginning, everything seemed sweet. Ruffle-edged white floral jacquard jackets worn north of bloomers were meant to be a nod to the turn of the 20th century birth of Walt Disney, plus the corporation’s penchant for gothic revival in its castle architecture. Butterflies crafted from organza fluttered on scuba surfaces. Those butterflies signaled a metamorphosis from wide-eyed wonder to slouchy seen-it-alls: park rats. The designers mixed real vintage Disney merch shirts with fresh reinventions—‘Coperni princess’ was my fave, along with a shirt featuring Lumiere the candlestick, scorch marks and the phrase ‘I’ve been burned by you before’—with denim and embroidered shirting. There was a fairytale pair of jeans matched with a house Swipe bag that had both been encrusted, somehow permanently, with salt crystals.
1 October 2024
For resort, Coperni’s Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer were in an American state of mind. “I wanted to pay tribute to a place I love, which is Silicon Valley,” explained Meyer at a makeshift showroom in Manhattan where the pair briefly decamped to show their latest collection. It’s a very specific, very fitting choice for the pair who have made their interest in technology a common thread through all their collections.It’s not the first time that they’ve conjured a young woman who works in the sciences, but whereas pre-fall saw them more conceptually explore the wardrobe of a scientist working at the CERN in Switzerland, their vision of a young woman in California brought along an undeniably West Coast ease. There was a print, for starters, a floral that was in fact not a flower at all but apples. “Because in Silicon Valley there are a lot of fields—but you know, alsoApple,” Meyer said playfully of the technicolor print that appeared on jacquard cardigan and boy short twinsets, breezy wrap dresses, and a button-down shirt layered over a simple white tee and tucked into ’70s-style patch pocket jeans. “There’s also a bit of the San Francisco flower-power hippie thing,” added Meyer.Other denim styles were playfully asymmetrical, like the denim jacket and trousers with only one sleeve or one leg respectively—ready to be worn by any number of cool It-girls on the red carpet—or a maxi denim skirt, the sinuous line created by the hem was sensual and playful, a no-brainer purchase. Preppy striped polo shirts and dresses were a handsome contrast to the apple print pieces. “We wanted something a bit more ‘university’ because of Stanford,” Meyer said.Elsewhere the designers riffed on straightforward “tech guy” influences. For a few seasons they have been toying with turning outerwear into bodysuits, and it was funny to see the ever-present “performance” vest get the Coperni treatment (although a blue weather-proof hiking jacket bodysuit was the best interpretation this season). The cursed “toe sneakers” got a chic makeover in the form of sleek Mary Janes in white leather or black with crystal embellishments that take the whole non-shoe shoe thing to the next level.A heathered gray sweatshirt readSTAY FOOLISH STAY HUNGRYin contrasting yellow bubble letters. It was taken from theWhole Earth Catalog, a cult magazine/catalog from the late ’60s that focused on a do-it-yourself, environmentally conscious counter-cultural lifestyle.
It was popularized by Steve Jobs, who quoted it when he delivered the commencement address at Stanford in 2005. An exhortation to stay curious about the world, to not be complacent with the things that are a given is something that Meyer and Vaillant can certainly relate to.
5 June 2024
A towering black obelisk—or maybe a half-flipped Asterix–loomed over us in the far, far, away Aubervillier TV soundstage to which Coperni had transported us as its late-night space. The obelisk (very Kubrick) lit up as John Williams’s The Conversation from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of The Third Kind played.“The collection is a whole sci-fi tribute,” confirmed Arnaud Vaillant backstage. Star-soled shoes left otherworldly footprints beneath ‘flying saucer’ dresses with Mars Attacks skirts. Cable knits were vertically sliced in order to create a swooshy hyperspace blur. There were gold-layered silver foil space blanket dresses and skirts that shed little scraps of space junk as they orbited that obelisk. The models’ hair was styled as if slicked with Xenomorph slime, and some fantastic articulated faux-talons mirrored Xenomorph manicures. Faux fur coats and bags in terrestrial tonal browns and beige were edged in spurts of green and blue: alien blood. A fitted black top and white dress were patterned with poppers that echoed the charging inputs applied to the future-human battery packs in the Matrix movies. Models carried micro handbags in Ziploc evidence bags, a la Mulder with an artifact. A white dress came with a long sheer skirt below an attached white shirt in crisp white cotton: Scully gone wild. A clutch bag was modeled after a clipboard binder: literally (almost) theX-Files.Every compelling sci-fi narrative—especially if invasion-related—demands its Pandora: the scientist who understands what’s coming before the rest of us do. Tonight that role was played uncannily well by professor Ioannis Michaloudis, who backstage explained how he’d created a version of Coperni's emblematic Swipe bag in a mix of 99 percent air, 1 percent silicon nano-something—apparently a material used by NASA to “catch stardust.” Fittingly, all this went totally over my head, but the bag looked cool. It was toted onto the runway by Leon Dame dressed after Jude Law inGattaca.Although the two cameramen who orbited the models as they walked (for the stream, of course) were vexingly distracting IRL this was otherwise an entertainingly immersive space opera fashion show. The two final dresses came framed in feathered hoops at the shoulder along the lines ofStar Trek’s transporter aura. The truth was in here: Coperni has the technology.
5 March 2024
If you are in the middle of a pre-collection appointment and you suddenly find yourself talking about the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, then you can only be meeting with Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant. “As you know, we are very inspired by technology and innovation—it’s our passion,” Meyer said on a recent Zoom from the apartment the two designers share. “I had this dream to visit this place.” Though the institution is “a very secretive place,” it seems it was won over by the fact that Meyer and Vaillant sought inspiration in the laboratory—and its scientists. “We like to think this collection is a bit like jumping in the life of a researcher,” Meyer added. “There are a lot of casual looks because she spends all day and night working—because the lab is going 24 hours—but she wins a Nobel Prize for all her discoveries, so there are also a lot of evening gowns.”There were button-downs worn over tank tops and paired with sweatpants or jeans and topped off with slouchy jackets for a real business-casual vibe. A track jacket bodysuit-cum-romper worn over a white shirt buttoned all the way up will ensure the so-called pantless trend continues for at least another season. “It’s this whole idea of merging bodysuits with workwear—the jacket pattern is made of 47 different pieces,” says Vaillant. “But then it works so well. You can wear it open, and it looks cool too.” A baby tee emblazoned with the phrase “Do NOT Power Down” across the front was taken from an old photo of a computer belonging to Tim Berners-Lee, who created an early version of a web server.For evening, the Coperni designers indulged in textures inspired by CERN’s machinery. A shiny golden knitted Lurex was used in an easy draped dress as well as a polo-neck long-sleeve top and matching elastic-waist pants for an upscale take on the classic sweatsuit. An electric blue shiny jacquard on a strapless dress with an upper-thigh cutout mimicked the mass of cables and wires that keep the machines running. Elsewhere there was a pair of boxers in what the designers called a “tech nylon meets organza that feels a bit like paper” and a sexy mini slip dress made from what they described as a “lace covered with silicone that looks like milk.”
19 January 2024
Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant have become a big noise in fashion (two seasons ago, an unignorable cacophony) by cleverly blending the contemporary fascination for technology with highly contemporary and fun womenswear design. Tonight they took us on a journey into sound.We were at IRCAM, a 1977-founded institute next to the Pompidou Center dedicated to sonic research. Downstairs in a high-roofed hall the show opened with a blast of abstract noise. Then the banks of insulated panels set into the ceiling and walls began to move, rotating to bounce the sound waves in different directions, affecting the manner in which they reached our ears. The audience raised its camera phones to shoot video.This was the fanfare to herald a collection in which the designers’ ingenuity bounced against technology both new and old to muster clothes that echoed this most intangible of concepts. The newer 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, tangentially to the main theme, 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”. Another new but not sound-led development was the unveiling of a Coperni sneaker, “a collision of soccer boots and loafers” co-created with Puma.Jacket lapels were in the peaked shape but notched far lower than usual. Knitwear sleeves hung way down below the wrist, or were sometimes knotted. Meyer said that this impression of stretching was in part because the sound of the fabric being wrenched had been incorporated into the soundtrack by u.r.trax (composed during a residency at IRCAM), and partly because they were looking to remix a new, silhouette-signaled impression of nonchalance. That soundtrack, albeit very abstractedly, also included the percussion of zippers: one sheer black dress featured meters of fine zipper ruffled across the neckline, similarly hemmed were capri pants in denim and jersey. A white lace-detailed dress was strewn with 3D printed “flowers'' that were generated by cymatic production: through bouncing particles on a plate subject to sound vibrations. The symbolically resonant Coperni Swipe bag was reimagined as a Discman. 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: this was something a trombonist might dispute, however 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 that was a wearable cousin of Anish Kapoor’s sonic monument “Marsyas.” By the time the models had finished their closing walks, that soundtrack had fallen silent. But as the designers came out to bow, the crowd had mostly put their phones down: applause filled the room.
30 September 2023
For resort, Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant were in a fantasy kind of mood. “Sébastien had this idea of a superhero, so he added some capes in the back,” Vaillant explained during a Zoom from the duo’s Parisian home. “He wanted to empower women with this detail that actually, when you wear it, is pretty minimal.”Beyond their penchant for catsuits, it may seem incongruous to think of superheroes as minimal, but that is indeed the vision for the newest collection. Luckily for Coperni’s customers, the designers pushed their vision beyond the opening look, a catsuit (obviously) with an asymmetrical detail at the chest, a little cape flying in the wind, and boots designed with their own zip flies, belt loops, and belts. The best execution of the cape idea came on a pair of apron-like shift dresses, one black and another in a classic glen plaid. “The construction for this, if you hold it up, it’s just a superlong dress with a round hole for the head,” Vaillant shared, laughing. “I love it because it’s super minimal, a little Calvin Klein.” A long-sleeve shift dress with a jacket collar made in the same two fabrics also captured a chic ’90s minimalist feel.The superhero theme continued in a series of comic-book-print pieces that told the story of—what else?—Coperni itself. “It’s inspired by big moments for the company,” Vaillant shared. “You have the meteor bag falling on the earth, and then you have [scenes] from our previous shows: the robots, the wolf and the lamb, Bella [Hadid] being sprayed, the cars during the pandemic….” It’s an IYKYK print that will surely become a must-have for Coperni fans, especially on the knit twinset they paired with a black knee-length skirt with a cutout at the hip.While the label is known for its cutouts and going-out tops and party dresses, they do make pieces suited for more professional environments without losing that joie de vivre, such as the low-slung slim trousers (with a detachable cape) worn with a slinky button-down shirt or the royal blue suit with a trompe l’oeil collar detail and slim pin-tucked trousers. In the look book, the model is carrying an extra-large version of Coperni’s popular Swipe bag in croc-stamped leather. Big enough to fit a small child, it’s proof that Meyer and Vaillant understand that the number one need of superhero women everywhere is a really big bag that fits the universe inside it.
Elsewhere the duo scanned a variety of busy-life necessities—like wallets with keys inside, headphones (with a cord, the way the cool girls like to wear them), and lighters—and printed them on a leather bomber jacket. It was a nod to superheroes’ X-ray vision and another fun piece to have.
18 July 2023
Like many designers, Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant went back to their core design roots for pre-fall. “This collection is all about the classics,” said Vaillant on a recent Zoom from the duo’s shared home in Paris. “So we have the cutouts that we do every season —” “But also,” continued Meyer, “we started designing this collection before the last show, withThe Wolf and The Lamband the robots, so there are a lot of details that follow that premise. This is why there is more of a nature spirit with the fake fur and the shearling, and the motorcycle jacket which gives an attitude to the girl to confront the robots.”Absent the viral runway spectacles that have made the Coperni designers an intrinsic part of the industry zeitgeist, it’s easy to see that their clothes are in fact the reason why their label is so successful. They are imbued with a cool factor, but are also very easy to wear. Take the opening little black dress; it’s a simple mini with a cross-halter neck, banded waist, and asymmetrical skirt, but they’ve added some deconstructed motorcycle jacket pieces on the bodice and tailoring details to the skirt. Another slinky satin mini dress with an asymmetrical cutout at the chest has a bit of contrasting black lace peeking through. Women may have little party dresses in their closet already, but they won’t have little party dresses like these—the desire is built-in.The motorcycle details continue in patchworked moto-pants cut to a capri-length. An all-black pair became their version of a suit, worn with a satin button-down shirt with a cutout at the chest and a wrap-detail at the neckline, and a two-button jacket with their go-to “belt and loops” detail on the arm, while another pair cut in denim was paired with a denim capelet in an interesting take on the Canadian tuxedo trend that shows no signs of stopping.One of their popular styles is a trouser that recalls that early aughts raver look of wearing individual pant legs-as-legwarmers, except Meyer and Vaillant have attached them to leggings with a trompe l’oeil effect of a mini-waistband, belt loops, and belt on each leg. On a cream tailored suit—worn with nothing underneath the jacket, of course—the effect is just unhinged enough; like it’s waiting for a pop star to be declared “iconic.”Elsewhere, they deconstructed a cargo maxi-skirt, another Y2K favorite, and turned it into a semi-formal high-low skirt.
Paired with a half-zip fleece sweater and shearling trimmed black pointy-toed cowboy boots, it captured the exact chaotic mix favored by today’s hippest twenty-something girls.
10 July 2023
Halfway through this show, just like the rest of the audience, I found myself transfixed by the yoga posings of five Boston Dynamics robo-dogs—all named Spot—that were the same vibrant yellow as a 1980s Sony Walkman Sports. At first unsettling (I’d just seen aGuardianvideowith a similarly canine robo spraying rounds from an attached machine-gun: would they give us 20 seconds to comply?) and then distracting yet entrancing, their cameo at tonight’s Coperni show was the latest tech-lead coup de théâtre from Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant.Backstage beforehand, the designers reflected on last season’s viral Bella Hadid spray-on dress, a gesture that was both totally in line with their deeper tech-friendly philosophy yet was also a stunt that spread Coperni brand awareness beyond their wildest dreams. “Last season was magical, a once in a lifetime experience, and now we are going to take it chill,” said Vaillant. Still, they leaned into their model of shaping shows around a futuristic mise en scene, this time by recruiting the Boston Dynamics cyber-canines to play their part in an updated retelling of French fabulist Jean de la Fontaine’sThe 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—spoiler: the lamb gets it—this was a nice literary device for tonight’s performance. 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.Next came Rianne Van Rompaey, swathed in a blanket, to perform the key interaction with the one Spot who carried a robo-arm on top of its body. She and Spot engaged in a sort of snake-charm eye lock before the arm removed the blanket and returned it to her.
After this interlude the show shifted emphasis to the more technologically driven, featuring a huge shaggy coat in light reactive recycled nylon (the designers said 70 percent of the collection was recycled) and pieces featuring human re-paintings of AI-generated images ofThe Wolf and The Lamb. We saw the meteorite Swipe Bag that had already been trailed on Instagram.You could be a cynic and suggest that tonight the real Wolf was Coperni’s clear compulsion to serve the viral appetite created by last season’s coup. The Lamb, devoured as an afterthought, was the collection itself. But Meyer and Vaillant are mindful of the boundaries they are pushing in order to code new conceptions of luxury fashion in our tech-driven society: they are writing their own fable. Speaking of which, I suggested during the preview that we get ChatGPT to write this review. They were totally into the idea, but sadly the result—at least for now—was rubbish.
3 March 2023
Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer’s six minute application of a spray-on dress on Bella Hadid in a thong proved thecoup de théâtreof Paris Fashion Week. In the 48 hours after that show, Launchmetrics calculated, the moment generated $26.3 million dollars worth of coverage. A few months on, the two young designers remain delightedly flabbergasted by that impact. Said Vaillant: “It’s been fantastic. One good thing is that people understand that Coperni is a ‘techno chic’ brand, a tech startup in fashion, which is what we are trying to do. And the other is that while Coperni was known within the industry—we relaunched it four years ago now—this was a real pop culture moment that has allowed us to become more known. So it is amazing. Everybody has been talking about it. One of our very proudest moments is thatMickey Mousemagazine in France gave it a page, to explain to the kids what was happening. This means that suddenly we are talking to a broader audience, and we are very happy about that.”Meyer, the geek of the pair, is already busy planning next Paris Fashion Week’s tech-led abracadabra moment. In the meantime the Coperni team is focused on bringing this resort collection to market. Shot by Thue Norgaard, the lookbook features Kiki Willems wearing a collection that’s consistent with the brand’s ongoing codes of progressive wearables while also containing several fresh updates. There were, naturally, some references to the tech industry—and especially the designers’ beloved Apple—embedded in the collection. These included AirPod shaped ear adornments and the house’s first iPhone case (for a 13). Helter skelter heel shapes were inspired by old school spiral cords from landline telephones. More subtly, the pops of zingy color in accessories and spandex pieces were meant to evoke smartphone icons against a collection whose wallpaper palette was predominantly pure Parisian monochrome.The tailoring was backed with technical fabrics, sportily expressed, in order to allow full movement. The house “flower gown” was reissued in a metallic-treated lace, while its twisted dress came in mohair that lent the piece a fuzzily defocused aura. Other organic touches included a zebra print and paint-flecked denim. Said Meyer: “For a show there is, not pressure, but more difficulty because we have to find these very creatively advanced pieces. Here it is more about spontaneous pleasure.
” Even without a spray on headline, Coperni’s recently-boosted community of followers should find plenty to take pleasure in here.
28 November 2022
Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant delivered one of the fashion moments of the season tonight: almost certainly it’s already going viral. The whole process lasted around seven minutes and came at the end of a show that had already given plenty of great runway. 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. 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.Especially lovable were the dresses in panels connected by a sort of brutal metal suture. Then there were the new, specially-developed Roblox-inspired shoulders that looked sometimes like the models were wearing cereal boxes but also seemed a valid shot at a silhouette-shifting development. Other pieces saw bra cups reinterpreted as shoulder pads. These were just a few of the ideas in a collection that boasted a cornucopia of them. One less spectacular touch, nicely illustrative of their frame of reference, was the red dress designed to reflect Fiona Johnson’s sexy glitch gown inThe Matrix.The collection was named Coperni Femme, after their very first collection back in 2015: it was an ode to a reconfigured paradigm of femininity. The opening references to crinoline, replacing its constricting hoops with a Trinity-esque biker jacket slung at the back of a tailored jacket, implied the flavor of radical upgrade the designers were after.That closing look laid it out in full. Bella Hadid came out in her underwear, arm across her bosom, and stood on an underlit platform. What followed was down, Vaillant said, to “our little geek” 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—that until five minutes ago had been liquid in a bottle: fashion alchemy, conjured by Coperni.
30 September 2022
If this Coperni pre-fall collection looks familiar, that’s because some pieces strode down the Paris runway at their fall show, and others have already made their celebrity debuts. Rihanna, whose pregnancy style was much parsed on thiswebsite, modeled the upper half of the stretch jersey cut-out dress in look 15.The red carpet credits started accumulating for Coperni when Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant took a sexier tack. Since celebrity sightings beget eager shoppers, we should expect more in this vein from them. But their talents for tailoring shouldn’t be overlooked and here’s hoping they don’t neglect them amidst commercial pressures for ever-more cut-outs.The twist-front jackets are mini marvels of construction, intricate but cool, not conceptual. Leggings with belted-on flared gaiters above the knee are also novel. It’s hard to reinvent pants, but these qualify as a very playful rethink. No surprise to hear that they’re among their top sellers this season.
16 June 2022
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 Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien 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.”Clothes contain stories, texts within textile, interwoven. The women of Cap Est who are in jeopardy stitched theirs into this collection while helping the designers realize their surface narrative. Vaillant said they have been working with their partner in Kyiv for a year so far: “We do a lot of tailoring, and what is important to us as well as the quality is the price. We want to dress the new generation, so we cannot do jackets for 2,000 euros.”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—Babylon Zoo to Placebo—the models first emerged as laconically withdrawn, cloistered in those hooded pieces of generically reinvented tailoring. These did indeed work (as in look 9) 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—recently worn in Euphoria—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.
3 March 2022
Coperni’s pre-spring pictures look like a smartphone home screen, with the famously changeable Paris temperature and weather forecast superimposed on each of the 22 looks. Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Valliant made that creative decision to drive home the wearability of these clothes. They’re designed with their end use in mind: the street, not the runway, a point that the see-now, buy-now release of these images reinforces.The biggest point of difference between Coperni’s most recent runway and this offering are the T-shirts, which merge the label’s curvy C monogram and the planets in the solar system in a clever take on the omnipresent logo tee. There’s also denim—note the sexy cutouts at the shoulders of the fitted jean jacket. Sexy is the defining characteristic of the collection, somewhat more so than in their previous pre-season outings. Meyer and Valliant see sexy through a 1960s-by-way-of-the-2020s lens, a combination that’s resonating broadly across fashion. The skirts are mini, the platforms are towering, and the blazers always top a hoodie.
6 December 2021
The last 20 months away from the runways prompted us all to ask big questions of fashion. So now that we are back at it, where are fashion’s big answers? So far there have been very few at the spring 2022 shows: Most houses, especially the biggest, are staying in their lane.Coperni’s Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer negotiated this issue elegantly by naming their 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.Kicking a problem into the long grass is always tempting, as was the odor that filled the show space thanks to 70,000 stems of hemp from which the set was constructed. The hemp was related to a sustainable fabric initiative in which the designers are involved: they said once the show was done this aged hemp was going to be used to make gin—another noble initiative.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: This was thanks not to the odor but 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. Eve Jobs, daughter of Steve, was making her runway debut here but carried the Swipe instead. This Coperni collection might have prevaricated on those Big Questions, but it definitely delivered answers for next summer sybarites in search of wearable pleasures.
30 September 2021
This is Coperni’s first pre-fall collection, a sign that Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant’s label is growing nicely. Meyer, the collection’s designer, cuts a sharp jacket; he likes a slim, aerodynamic silhouette that nods at Andre Courrèges by way of Nicolas Ghesquière. As the pandemic has loosened up our ways of dressing, Coperni’s fabrics and shapes are softening too. Meyer chose bottle green velvet for one jacket; another was cut asymmetrically and oversized enough that a hoodie could be comfortably worn underneath it. The combo looked like something that model Audrey Marnay could walk off set in and resume her everyday life.Beyond the tailoring, Meyer and Vaillant are expanding their knits. The side-buttoning shrugs are likely to inhibit easy movement, but clingy ribbed sweaters with cutouts at the shoulders served up the right blend of fashion and wearability. As ever, their accessories are on point. Knee-high boots with A-line shafts complemented the trapeze shifts they were paired with, and they’ve introduced a funny arrow bag whose graphic shape appears to be lifted from Apple’s cursor icon.
9 June 2021
Having staged their spring show on the roof of La Tour Montparnasse, Paris’s highest skyscraper, Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant were disinclined to do something virtual for fall. But how to put on a live show when showing outdoors in wintry weather is out of the question, and the city’s ongoing COVID-19confinémentsmake showing inside impossible too? They landed on the idea of a drive-in, and selected the Accor Arena, a giant stadium on the outskirts of town famous for 2000s-era Alexander McQueen shows, as a venue. Parisians know it as the place Beyoncé plays.“We always love to do a new project and create a surprise,” said Meyer, the designer in the duo. “It’s a lot of pressure, but we’re happy because we found a good idea.” Last season’s concept show paid off, added Vaillant, who handles the business; “We picked up 30 new clients,” he said. Not all young brands have had that experience in the pandemic.Meyer and Vaillant have made a signature of an efficient, athleticized minimalism. They were creative directors of Courrèges for a couple of years and the aerodynamics of the couturier’s Space Age designs left an imprint on their aesthetic. But this season they wanted to give their clothes a nighttime gloss. Adut Akech opened the show in an off-the-shoulder A-line minidress, and Mica Argañaraz closed it in a see-through painted lace shift. There was also a robe coat in faux fur, a nod to that other thing that happens after dark: sleep. Some of Meyer’s most compelling thinking happens on the accessories front, a growing part of the brand. A new bag in apple leather unzips completely flat, and the ballet skimmers zip up too, for easy transport.At the drive-in, the headlights of 36 electric cars lit up the runway. There were two guests per vehicle, with a PCR-tested driver at each wheel, and there was no getting out and mingling. Still, it was about as close as anybody who was there has gotten to real nightlife in a year. Another reason to miss Paris.
4 March 2021
Fashion is going to look different on the other side of COVID-19, but not in the easy to see ways of new silhouettes and obvious trends. The pandemic and its consequences are forcing designers to build their brands differently. In 2020, emerging talents have been talking about growing deliberately and producing with purpose. Coperni’sSébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillantare among that cohort.Resort 2021 is their first pre-collection. Instead of going big, they kept it small. “It’s 12 looks, so it’s super-tight,” Vaillant said. “Buyers liked the fact that there was one strong message.” Meyer added: “the goal of Coperni is to take time, to find our own… not system, but to go where it’s healthier for the brand.”They named the collection “Future of Love.” It’s not romantic, though; Coperni’s aesthetic is always sharp. “It’s a uniform of love,” Vaillant clarified. They used a heart motif to shape the rounded lapels of constructed jackets and cotton shirts; inset a heart on an otherwise simple t-shirt; and made hard leather bags, one of their signatures, in the familiar shape. To back it all up, Coperni will make a substantial donation from the sales of the pieces to support the work of the charitable organization One Laptop Per Child, which provides laptops along with support and training for classrooms around the world. Their donation will go to a school in Nicaragua, which has suffered two hurricanes this year on top of COVID-19.Early on in the pandemic Meyer and Vaillant created an Instagram tutorial about mask making. The experience was rewarding enough they decided to build the concept of helping people into their business plan. “Coperni is still small, but it’s important to start supporting people,” Vaillant said, adding, “we’ve been especially worried about education in this time, with kids not being able to go to school, and we wanted to connect [what we do] to technology. We feel if we have the right balance between tech and the human side we can go far.”There are plenty of downsides to the pandemic, but the Coperni designers see the upsides, too. “One of the good things of our difficult world,” says Meyer, “is I feel that people are going to help each other more.”
4 December 2020
In lockdown Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Valliant launched a DIY mask making project on Instagram. This was in the early days of the pandemic, when solution-oriented designers scrambled to fill in the gaps left by overwhelmed and underperforming governments. “We were inspired [to start making masks] by our family, most of whom work in the medical field,” they said at the time. “We immediately wanted to help, even with our limited assets.” Soon, they started receiving selfies from Instagram followers around the world who used their easy-to-sew pattern to make masks. As they started to work on this collection, they found themselves hooked on the feel-good results of their problem-solving and decided to make it part of their mission at Coperni.On a Zoom call the day before their show they proudly showed off a new technical jersey material dipped in a solution that renders it anti-UV and antibacterial as well as wrinkle resistant. For years, fashion watchers have been waiting for the runways to catch up with the technical advancements happening in the outdoors and sporting markets. COVID-19, the great accelerator, has hastened that process for the Coperni duo. “The starting point of the collection was how can we improve things and how can we protect everybody?” said Valliant. Meyer added: “I think for designers it’s our duty to evolve the clothes and make them more protective and more comfortable.”The jersey, which they cut into aerodynamic jackets and body-conscious dresses is a preview of a future in which clothes do more work for their wearers, and a promising area of exploration for Coperni. The longer the coronavirus crisis draws out—and the experts agree we’re in this for the duration—the more potential there is for fashion that’s merely decorative to seem frivolous.Then again, Meyer and Valliant aren’t about to abdicate the notion of fashion for fashion’s sake. Other parts of the collection showcased the graphic fabric manipulation and the spare but idiosyncratic patternmaking that they’ve made their specialities. They staged their show on the roof of La Tour Montparnasse, the highest skyscraper in Paris, under a light rain. The move makes literal the one-upmanship of the old ways, but the designers see it as an optimistic gesture in a moment that has sharpened their focus. “It hasn’t been an easy season and it’s been stressful,” said Valliant, “but we have to stand up.”
29 September 2020
A troop of hacker replicants took over Station F, a startup campus on Paris’s east side, this morning. Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant staged their first-ever Coperni show in the campus’s expansive atrium. The venue suits their vision—the look of the new collection is severe, sexy, and futuristic. Meyer and Vaillant share a forward-looking bent with Marine Serre, whose show preceded theirs, but where hers is a foreboding aesthetic, theirs has echoes of the utopian 1960s Space Age, from which they source some of their inspiration. The Coperni designers spent two years at Courrèges, whose founder André Courrèges laid the foundations for Space Age style. Their other influences are early Balenciaga-era Nicolas Ghesquière and Helmut Lang.It’s one of the mysteries of fashion that mod minimalism, which is now half a century old and from which Ghesquière and Lang also lifted, is still aligned with our imagined version of the future. Doubly so considering that the Silicon Valley computer engineers who are constructing our digital future are hoodie-wearing, Tevas-loving types.That isn’t a criticism of Meyer and Vaillant. This was a persuasive outing: confident in its minimal concision, if fairly unforgiving for any of us who don’t share the Coperni duo’s rigorous discipline. Pants suits were cut close to the body with very little in the way of excess, save for the flourish here and there of extra-long split sleeves or a jacket hem that swooshed to one side in a gesture suggestive of movement. An LBD cut asymmetrically at the neckline was just as lean. How a hacker replicant gets dressed for her days off was somewhat less resolved, though their split-hem kick flares looked as cool with a pair of chunky white sneakers as they did with their strappy sandals. Maybe even cooler. Those of us who spend our days (and nights) hunched in front of computers know that comfort counts for a lot. That’s a subject for Meyer and Vaillant to decode next time.
25 February 2020
Instead of the standard runway show format, Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant hosted a screening of a short film at the Apple store on the Champs Élysées today. The duo made an impression on the fashion community during their three seasons at Courrèges. When their gig at that Paris heritage brand ended, they took some time to themselves before relaunching their original label, Coperni, with the cleverest of ideas: a Choose Your Own Adventure Instagram account and a minimalist collection focused on tailoring and ’60s-ish shift dresses that got the balance just right between savvy branding and smart design.Their new Spring collection is about “connectivity,” hence the venue for their short film. The concept came across most clearly with their leather Wi-Fi bag, which reproduced the familiar signal arches in black and white leather. There was also a Bluetooth bow on the waistband of miniskirts. A vestigial strap on the left shoulder of a neatly tailored blazer was meant to have some sort of relation to the theme, but it was more tenuous—though a customer can scan the jacket’s QR code to find out the fabric’s origins. Meyer and Vaillant like a close-to-the-body silhouette stripped of all but the most rigorous surface details, but even by their minimalist standards the ideas this season were a little thin. One concept that had legs was the pair of Mary Jane ballerinas that, with the adjustment of a few buckles, morphed into an ankle-strap style. These two have a lot of good ideas; with the necessary ready-to-wear development, we hope to see more of them put into action next season.
24 September 2019
Paris Fashion Week has an Instagram-first brand. Rather than spending money on a fashion show, Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant have created an Instagram experience modeled on the Choose Your Own Adventure books. (For millennial nonreaders, the Choose Your Own Adventure series was the progenitor of Netflix’s recentBlack Mirror: Bandersnatchepisode). The designers see the account—handle:@copernize_your_life—as an efficient, modern way to spread the word about their revived label. Also, they’re making clothes for “real life”—suits, shirting, knits, tees, and dresses—so it makes sense to put the garments in situations their customers might actually encounter (like running for a train, attending a work meeting, or swiping right on Tinder), rather than showing them on a traditional catwalk. Models Hanne Gaby Odiele and Teddy Quinlivan do star in the opening clips—choose Hanne Gaby if you’re a Type A, Teddy if you’re Type B—but otherwise it’s a cast of fashion professional amateurs: Their PR person and stylist make appearances, as do Paris- and New York–based editors, consultants, and other arbiters. The project is clever, and, as they say in the business, highly clickable.As for the non-virtual aspects of this comeback—the clothes—they looked smart, too. During their two years at Courrèges, Meyer and Vaillant pitched items rather than total looks, paring them back to their essence without stripping them of identifiable traits. That cool, minimal sensibility carried through here, but the clothes weren’t dull or boring. One of the collection’s motifs was trompe l’œil; they cut into coats and jackets to create the illusion of three-dimensional collars, lapels, and flap pockets. Their other theme was vortexes: A wool coat featured many of them, like polka dots with depth (more of that cutting away), and a T-shirt dress was printed with their lower case “c” logo in a swirling vortex pattern. If any of this sounds tricky, it wasn’t. Meyer and Vaillant’s work is precise, and thanks to their efforts to keep prices low enough for the friends they want to dress, many of the pieces will be less expensive than they look.Meyer and Vaillant have gone the heritage-house-creative-director route, and, having come out the other side, are charting a new way forward.
Are fashion shows necessary? Are designer collections just too expensive? Does Instagram success convert into real-life success? For the answers to these questions, these are two young men the industry should be watching.
26 February 2019
What do Copernicus and fashion have in common? Very little on the surface, but not in the eyes of Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, the couple behind the up-and-coming French label Coperni Femme and recipients of this year's ANDAM First Collection Prize. The Prussian astronomer was a soft revolutionary: Turning the tables, he defined the solar system as we know it today with his notion of heliocentrism. Similarly, Meyer and Vaillant aim at creating a soft wardrobe revolution, marrying clean shapes with intense handwork and innovative fabrications. There is something exquisitely Parisian, in the modernist/futurist sense of the term, about Coperni: Fast lines come across as a fine balance of dryness and bourgeois chic; they demand a lean body, a strong personality, and no makeup. The collection, so far sold exclusively at Opening Ceremony, is small and focused. Spring '15 included such staples as the minidress, the A-line skirt, skinny trousers, blousons, shirts, and tops. Surface decoration was limited to rhythmic inlays, repetitive slashes, and graphic signs. That's it. Futurism is clearly high on Meyer and Vaillant's agenda, and so is salability: They are designer and financial director, respectively. Their work has character. A pale blue shirt with extra-long sleeves knotted and twisted around the wrists showed it also has the capacity to be a bit more daring.
8 August 2015
For a label that owes its name to one of the greatest astronomers of all time, Coperni Femme's choice of the circle as a starting point felt entirely apropos. Whether or not you accept the through-line from Copernicus to womenswear, this latest collection from Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant made a strong case for expounding on one idea—incidentally, the purest of all forms—over and over again.The designers' exploration and integration of circles ranged from the literal (disks of leather, suede, and papery metallic kangaroo patched together with topstitched crosses) to the figurative (large loops for armholes and undulations in place of peplums). Even the closures—brushed-metal eyelet snaps—stayed consistent to the theme. Meyer and Vaillant allowed their circles latitude, too: A detachable ruffled cuff in stiff poplin could be twisted around the wrist, extended up the sleeve, and affixed to the shoulder, or left to dangle like an architectural tail. An extra-long knit sleeve slit to the forearm could be tied nonchalantly around the wrist. In sum, there was no shortage of well-considered design.The execution was equally strong, in part because the designers were assisted by Legeron (one of the artisan ateliers within the Paraffection group) for the leather cutting, and Massaro for the shoes, which featured a fine metal ring elegantly orbiting the arch. Such novelty detail would suggest higher pricing, and retailers may choose to buy in at this level or stick with the safer bets, notably the jackets—some close-cropped, others longer and sans lapels. In the meantime, as winners of ANDAM's First Collections Prize and among the short list for the LVMH Prize, Meyer and Vaillant have been rightfully acknowledged as renaissance designers. They apply reason instead of attempting to reinvent. And right now, that resonates.
3 March 2015