A troop of hacker replicants took over Station F, a startup campus on Paris’s east side, this morning. Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant staged their first-ever Coperni show in the campus’s expansive atrium. The venue suits their vision—the look of the new collection is severe, sexy, and futuristic. Meyer and Vaillant share a forward-looking bent with Marine Serre, whose show preceded theirs, but where hers is a foreboding aesthetic, theirs has echoes of the utopian 1960s Space Age, from which they source some of their inspiration. The Coperni designers spent two years at Courrèges, whose founder André Courrèges laid the foundations for Space Age style. Their other influences are early Balenciaga-era Nicolas Ghesquière and Helmut Lang.
It’s one of the mysteries of fashion that mod minimalism, which is now half a century old and from which Ghesquière and Lang also lifted, is still aligned with our imagined version of the future. Doubly so considering that the Silicon Valley computer engineers who are constructing our digital future are hoodie-wearing, Tevas-loving types.
That isn’t a criticism of Meyer and Vaillant. This was a persuasive outing: confident in its minimal concision, if fairly unforgiving for any of us who don’t share the Coperni duo’s rigorous discipline. Pants suits were cut close to the body with very little in the way of excess, save for the flourish here and there of extra-long split sleeves or a jacket hem that swooshed to one side in a gesture suggestive of movement. An LBD cut asymmetrically at the neckline was just as lean. How a hacker replicant gets dressed for her days off was somewhat less resolved, though their split-hem kick flares looked as cool with a pair of chunky white sneakers as they did with their strappy sandals. Maybe even cooler. Those of us who spend our days (and nights) hunched in front of computers know that comfort counts for a lot. That’s a subject for Meyer and Vaillant to decode next time.
