Fashion week is an event where fashion designers and brands, also known as “houses”, showcase new lines of clothing pieces. The event lasts for a week, giving it its signature name. The event happens in four cities around the world: New York, Milan, London and Paris.
During Paris Fashion Week, which was from Monday, Sep. 26, 2022, to Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022, a fairly new designer brand was one of the many houses showcased.
According to USM.com, “Coperni is a Parisian ready-to-wear and accessories brand, founded in 2013 by Sebastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant.” The author continues, “The name Coperni evokes the work of the Prussian astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who revealed the theory of heliocentrism, placing the sun at the center of the Universe. Here, people are at the center of creation, offering an elegant, practical wardrobe, born from intensive textile experimentation.”
Coperni regained attention this year when pop star and rapper, Doja Cat, wore a baby blue, glass version of their “Mini Swipe” bag on the 2022 Grammys red carpet. The Mini Swipe bag acquired its name by the high fashion community because of how similar it looks to the Apple lock screen icon, which indicates users to “swipe up to unlock”.
The success of the brand continued five months later at Paris Fashion Week when they showcased a scientific product on the body of a colloquially known nepotism baby, Bella Hadid.
Coperni’s Spring Summer ‘23 collection at Paris Fashion Week was an ode to their first collection, Coperni Femme, released back in 2015. This year’s collection showcased garments full of neutral colored cutout dresses, skin-tight floral tops and dresses, pieces with dramatic shoulders, tailored blazers, cropped jackets and much more.
Throughout the show, models walked around the perimeter of the Salle des Textiles at the National museum of Arts et Métiers in Paris. This left the middle of the room untouched with just a table with two spray guns on it.
For the closing finale of the show, Hadid walked out onto the middle of the room wearing nothing but a beige bikini bottom on. Three men walked up to the table with the spray guns. Two men picked up the guns while one began to fill each container with a white liquid. They then made their way to Hadid and began spraying her body from the top-down with the spray gun. Almost immediately, the white liquid solidified into a slip dress.
A woman then entered the platform and began to clean up the excess fabric. She pushed the sleeves off of Hadid’s shoulders and cut a slit into the left thigh of the dress. The woman exited the stage, and Hadid posed before exiting the platform.
This spray-on fabric Coperni presented was created by Manel Torress, who created the material back in 2003, along with his brand Fabricon. According to Charlotte Hu of Popular Science, Torre’s inspiration was silly string and spider webs. He wanted to renovate silly string as we know it and turn it into a finer fiber that’s dispersed through the guns showcased at the show.
“Torres explained in a 2013 Ted Talk that when this spray-on fabric comes in contact with air, it turns into a solid material that’s stretchy and feels like suede.” says Hu. The material is also sustainable. Fabricon states that their material is made with non-volatile organic compounds and their technology is ozone friendly. The material is recyclable and reduces its carbon footprint by being efficient and not working with overseas supply chains.
With Coperni being the first big designer house to use Fabricon, live, on the runway, in turn it opened the door for more research on how to merge the world of science and fashion.
Sébastien Meyer, Creative Director & Co-Founder of Coperni, and Arnaud Vaillant, CEO & Co-Founder of Coperni, are noted by Jess Pullar of Elle Autrailia as “constantly pushing boundaries by merging science with fashion,” and the spray on fabric was not an exception.
