Still thinking about *that* Bella Hadid moment from the Coperni SS23 show at Paris Fashion Week? Get to know the men behind the brand, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, who spoke to Grazia earlier this year for our May Luxury issue.
A little after 10am on a Thursday morning in Paris this March, a particularly good-looking party is in full swing in an unassuming, industrial area of Saint- Denis. In the middle of the action, It-girl belles of the ball – the Hadid sisters, Lila Moss and Paloma Elsesser among them – strut their stuff, as fabulously dressed as they are full of attitude. Like the best bashes, the soundtrack is pumping and the guests jubilant; here, however, they are confined to bopping in their seats, and leave considerably more energised and less bleary- eyed than when they arrived.
The event? Not, in fact, a party (officially) but the Coperni autumn/winter 2022 show. To pack out a morning-slot show at the tail end of fashion month is itself an achievement not to be sniffed at, but to get the attendees smiling, excited is a triumph.
There are two men to thank for the morning’s good vibes, the Parisian brand’s handsome, convivial co-founders Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, a duo who are smack bang in the middle of what you might call a moment.
The day before the show, and Coperni’s light-filled HQ fizzes with the industrious, electric anticipation of last-minute preparation. ‘We are very excited. We’re kind of achieving our dreams, working with all our friends,’ Arnaud, who is the brand’s CEO, tells me as we stand beside a board of the show looks, gesturing around the room. Kiki Willems is being fitted and Paloma has just walked in. The room is buzzing. ‘We have been working six months on the collection, it’s coming alive.'
Alive is a good word to describe the A/W ’22 collection, which is, Arnaud says, ‘an ode to youth’. They feel for them, they say, it’s been a dire couple of years. On the catwalk it reads like a slick, stylish coming-of-age story: strict, convent school uniforms giving way to rebellious, bike-sheds micro-skirts and sharp tailoring spliced into with cut-outs or hacked into abbreviated proportions. ‘You know how teenagers wear their pants super-low? Well she wears them super, super low,’ he says of the woman they’re designing for.
It is, as they have made their signature, playful and sexy but underpinned with a rigorous, innovative precision (the name Coperni is taken from 16th-century mathematician Copernicus, in honour of his desire to look forward, and then see things differently).
With a bit of savvy and a lot of luck, many young brands have been able to create hype; Coperni is delivering substance as well as style. So here, away from the lights, the make-up, the music, you can see already the pieces springing into action. Creative director Sébastien – who drew on his own adolescence both embracing and rejecting the formality of military schools – tweaks a spangled minidress, the collection finale, on Mica Argañaraz. She strides down the room and owns it, powerful, confident. The team loves it; it makes me – tame, sober, currently wearing corduroy – want to throw on some sheer glitz and go party-hopping.
The Coperni boys have a knack for knowing what women want to wear, because they are – first and foremost – dressing their friends. ‘We’ve been at home for the past two years and I feel that women, especially women of our generation, they want to feel hot, they want to feel sexy, they want to go out again,’ says Arnaud. Both transplants from the South of France, they also love that Coperni is a Parisian brand. Not that their woman is the jeans-and-a-blazer cut-and-paste we might think of. ‘I think this Parisian girl is evolving, isn’t she? The world is more international and digital.’
This communal spirit also translates to the way they work. Why pay an expensive consultant to come in once a year, they reason, when you can hire your friends? ‘Our studio is an open space, there are no doors, we can all talk together and share daily life,’ Sébastien tells me later. ‘It really is the spirit of a start-up. We all grow together.’
Although Coperni has lashings of new-brand energy, it celebrates its 10th anniversary next year (there was an unofficial two-year hiatus when the duo were scooped by Courrèges to helm the legendary brand’s reboot). Having solidly built up the Coperni name – winning ANDAM’s Creative Label Prize in 2014, LVMH Prize finalists in 2015 – A/W ’21 proved a turning point for the label.
That collection was presented during Paris Fashion Week in March last year. With much of the world still confined by Covid-19 restrictions at that time, most designers opted for digital presentations. Sébastien and Arnaud put on an IRL show – the only brand in Paris to do so – accommodating the strict social-distancing diktats with a drive-through staged at the Accor Arena stadium. The headlights of the assembled cars lit up the runway as models prowled through the night in precise, second-skin micro-dresses, power-shouldered tailoring, wet-look leather pants and spangled thigh-high boots. They anticipated something we had missed, something we were hungry for: going out and dressing up.
‘It was a special moment that will never happen again. The Covid restrictions pushed us to find new ways and solutions to continue to make the brand exist and to create dreams in that gloomy period that we were all going through,’ says Sébastien. ‘It was a true celebration of life’. ‘[We were] maybe a bit shy at the beginning,’ adds Arnaud. ‘Here something really happened. There was a lot of excitement for the brand.’
This energy has made Coperni a stealth hit with a highly influential, superlatively dressed celebrity fan base in the past year. It’s the kind of priceless exposure that is hard to choreograph. There’s Bella Hadid in a fresh-from-the-runway grey miniskirt suit – complete with cropped blazer – out in Paris. Hailey Bieber in a wrapped denim skirt, over-the-knee socks and Batman-ears hats. Then, Rosalia on Instagram in a patchwork mesh dress from the S/S ’22 collection. And all of that was in just one week. When Rihanna – owner of probably the most keenly watched wardrobe in the world right now – attended a beauty launch in LA in a custom twisted silver bra top and low-slung embellished skirt, a gilded frame to her glorious, blooming bump, it was official: Coperni is a Very Big Deal.
But while a celebrity love-in is a PR dream, for it to translate to sales, and longevity, you have to have product that real women not only desire but can actually tap into. They know that and already have a commercial and creative success on their hands with the Swipe Bag, an oval design inspired by the iPhone’s swipe to unlock function (an Easter Egg fact for fans: Eve Jobs, daughter of Steve, made her catwalk debut for Coperni in S/S ’22). Kim Kardashian has one. Doja Cat and Tinashe both took them as dates to the Grammys this year. Euphoria’s Maddy, played by Alexa Demie, is accompanied by a Swipe in her viral ‘Bitch, you better be joking’ scene.
That might have been Arnaud’s reaction when Sébastien – the riskier of the pair – first proposed the idea of producing a glass Swipe for A/W ’22. ‘It’s too fragile, it will break, it will be too expensive,’ was Arnaud’s initial reaction. But, when one of them wants black and one wants white, ‘we never do grey’. They never dilute.
So Sébastien won on the glass bag; he usually does, laughs Arnaud, ‘he’s creative director and you have to respect that magic. Sometimes he wants to go further and I let him. Then he doesn’t fight too much on the more commercial pieces that I need to do. The most interesting collections are when you have a spectacular latex dress but also an affordable tailored jacket that you can wear to the office.’ (The risk paid off. Those glass Swipes have gone into production and they’re selling. The second time I speak to Arnaud, on a Zoom call, he is drinking a glass of champagne, the Coperni team celebrating after Kylie Jenner wore one to The Kardashians press day.)
That closeness, the ability to balance one another, is forged in part because the pair are also partners in their personal lives; they got married in Hydra last summer. ‘We know each other to the core and we constantly balance each other out,’ says Sébastien. ‘When one is down the other takes over and vice versa.’ They met in 2009, as students at the same Parisian fashion school, Arnaud studying fashion business and management, Sébastien fashion design and pattern making. They both say it was love at first sight, a personal and professional crush. How do they separate work and play? The answer: they don’t. It’s their ‘baby’ they say, independently of one another; a responsibility, a passion that doesn’t just switch off come 6pm. The Coperni look might be all ‘play hard’ sass, but you don’t get to where they have without working hard, too. ‘The pace of Coperni is very organised, rigorous but then we always try to add a fun layer because we are not saving lives,’ says Arnaud.
That sentiment is glaringly illustrated as fashion month grinds on, the Russian invasion of Ukraine unfolding in real time. Sébastien and Arnaud wind up dedicating the collection to the women of the Kyiv atelier they work with on the outerwear and tailoring. It’s a time when fashion feels both redundant and essential, irrelevant and pertinent. But something Coperni reminds us of is the community of creativity, the joyful gesture of dressing up, that making an effort is a privilege and a life-affirming joy. They’re right, clothes aren’t saving lives, but, as Arnaud says, ‘The world is pretty complicated. I guess fashion can be fun.’
