For their fall 2024 ready-to-wear Coperni collection, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, with the help of researcher and professor Ioannis Michalous, created the Aerogel Air Swipe Bag. It is a bag made of … air!
Coperni knows how to design things that go viral. At the very end of the brand’s 2023 show in Paris, Bella Hadid, semi-nude, slowly walked to the center of the runway while scientists sprayed her with a liquid resembling silly string that morphed into a white dress with a thigh-high slit. There have been robot dogs, mirrored minis, and white lace dresses strewn with 3-D printed flowers — and now a bag made of air, backed by NASA.
Aerogel is a silicon-based solid with a spongelike, porous structure in which more than 99 percent of the volume is open space, making it a thousand times less dense than glass, often referred to as “blue smoke” or “solid smoke”.
Aerogel is made by integrating high temperatures and the pressure-critical-point drying of a gel composed of colloidal-silica structural units filled with solvents. Appearing almost like a cloud, the bag is the biggest piece ever crafted from the nanomaterial.
One giant leap for mankind, and fashion. It may seem confusing, but it makes perfect sense in combination with the rest of the interplanetary collection, which features archetypal outerwear paired with star-shaped stilettos, watery second-skin jersey dresses, UFO heels, and models in an alien state sans eyebrows. Like NASA, they’re focused on the future.
