Long Live Coperni

Coperni’s founders, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, announced on 4 November 2026 that their company was ceasing operations. They cited an unresolved dispute with Tomorrow, its distributor and shareholder. It is a dispiriting end to a label that made fashion feel unusually open to other people’s work.

Founded in 2013, Coperni first reached Opening Ceremony buyer Clara Cornet through a handful of Instagram posts. In a 2014 interview at the pair’s flat, Vaillant was planning fabric orders and hoping to hire a pattern cutter. Their favourite dress had taken days to make, its pieces of microfibre cut on the bias to form rows of waves. Lolita Jacobs helped with art direction and stayed late for fittings. The friends who contributed to Coperni would become as important to its identity as any single object.

In March 2021, seventy guests watched Coperni’s autumn/winter show from inside thirty-five cars. They were driven to Paris’s Accor Arena, where the vehicles formed the runway and their headlights illuminated the models. The idea came from the closing sequence of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, in which limousines return to a garage.

It solved a problem created by the pandemic, but Meyer and Vaillant also wanted to give people a night out. Maybe, the studio founded by their friends Charles Levai and Kevin Tekinel, provided creative direction. La Mode en Images produced the show, with music by Clara 3000. The cars brought the audience, seated them and lit the clothes.

The Swipe bag’s looping outline came from the iPhone’s swipe-to-unlock symbol. Keeping that recognisable shape allowed Coperni to change almost everything about how it was made.

For autumn/winter 2022, Meyer contacted Heven, the glassware studio of Breanna Box and Peter Dupont. Their horned vessels had begun as a present for the man who gave Box her first directing job. With glassblower Josh Raiffe at Brooklyn Glass, they worked out how to blow the bag in one piece. The glass was thick enough to need an air hose. Heven took Raiffe to Paris to see Gigi Hadid carry the result.

The CD-player Swipe, unveiled in September 2023 for spring/summer 2024, gave the familiar outline another use. Its silver body housed a working disc player, with wired headphones and a USB-C rechargeable battery. The disc fitted neatly beneath the looped handle.

For autumn/winter 2025, Coperni worked with Bandai on the Tamagotchi Swipe Case. The miniature version set the digital pet’s screen and three buttons beneath the handle. Together, the two designs gave familiar electronics a new silhouette, while keeping the small rituals of choosing a disc or caring for a virtual pet.

Coperni understood the value of being seen. Tekinel has been frank about the decision to make noise when the young label had little money, and about the friends who helped make the shows happen. But the most interesting collaborations gave those people room to bring something of their own. You can follow the glass bag back to Box’s gift, the Air Swipe to Michaloudis’s photographs, and the Ariel to a research lab trying to print furniture.

Meyer and Vaillant supplied a recognisable form and a public occasion for these experiments. Across the Swipe collaborations, the outline remained familiar while its weight, texture, and behaviour changed. The runway gave the work an audience; the objects gave it something to look at closely.

Some of the results will continue beyond the label. RLP’s account of adapting its methods to medical devices gives that continuation a practical form. Coperni will be missed for the commissions and encounters that made such work possible.