In most internet corners, Coperni is synonymous with Bella Hadid. That viral moment at the brand’s Spring 2023 show finale, where Hadid’s dress was sprayed to life in real time, will forever be seared in the cultural imagination; it was a fashion spectacle bar none. But for several seasons before then, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant have been steadily toiling away at their studio, conceiving a brand with French-girl appeal for the everyday, everywhere woman.
This collection built on that mission, traversing the worlds of work, play, leisure and like last season, high tech. It featured Boston Dynamics robot dogs, named Spot, that interacted with the models and played up the inspiration for the show: a fresh take on Jean de la Fontaine’s The Wolf and the Lamb, recontextualized to reflect man’s interaction with machine. This transpired in a series of opening looks belonging to the office with boucle-looking jackets and skirts that from afar, could have riffed on pixels in a screen. Tight tank-shaped dresses followed with three dimensional adornments — hands cinched around the fabric, stretching it this way and that — that nodded (perhaps a little too on the nose) to human intervention in a technologically-driven world, where ultimately, we’re pulling the strings.
Then, the collection veered somewhat unexpectedly into sportswear, with zip-up sweaters and nylon jackets fashioned like straitjackets. Said jackets extended a theme introduced earlier on in the show — that of being cocooned and wrapped in silhouettes that hug, explored via models clutching coats, skirts and dress shirts like blankets. These felt like literal interpretations of re-entering a world post-COVID, evoking a widespread state of hopefulness and uncertainty and a proclivity towards gear that keeps us comfortable and warm.
What followed next was most exciting. Outerwear and eveningwear solutions for fans of leather, denim and supermini dresses in silver and white feathers gave the collection a souped-up festive feel. As it drew to a close, the designers referred once again to the original fable, presenting leather jackets with painterly scenes depicting The Wolf and the Lamb alongside reworked denim, including a pair with a peplum at the waist and several versions with open flaps exposing the knees. Dressed in one of the aforementioned minis, model favorite Kiki Willems was a knockout in a scoop-neck concoction of silver plumage — not the finale look but worthy of special mention anyway, exemplifying the kinds of winners accelerating the brand’s success.
