Meet The Power Couple Behind Coperni, The Brand That Just Broke The Internet At PFW – GRAZIA
Mon 3 Oct
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-skirtsand 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.’