Fashion is going to look different on the other side of COVID-19, but not in the easy to see ways of new silhouettes and obvious trends. The pandemic and its consequences are forcing designers to build their brands differently. In 2020, emerging talents have been talking about growing deliberately and producing with purpose. Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant are among that cohort.
Resort 2021 is their first pre-collection. Instead of going big, they kept it small. “It’s 12 looks, so it’s super-tight,” Vaillant said. “Buyers liked the fact that there was one strong message.” Meyer added: “the goal of Coperni is to take time, to find our own… not system, but to go where it’s healthier for the brand.”
They named the collection “Future of Love.” It’s not romantic, though; Coperni’s aesthetic is always sharp. “It’s a uniform of love,” Vaillant clarified. They used a heart motif to shape the rounded lapels of constructed jackets and cotton shirts; inset a heart on an otherwise simple t-shirt; and made hard leather bags, one of their signatures, in the familiar shape. To back it all up, Coperni will make a substantial donation from the sales of the pieces to support the work of the charitable organization One Laptop Per Child, which provides laptops along with support and training for classrooms around the world. Their donation will go to a school in Nicaragua, which has suffered two hurricanes this year on top of COVID-19.
Early on in the pandemic Meyer and Vaillant created an Instagram tutorial about mask making. The experience was rewarding enough they decided to build the concept of helping people into their business plan. “Coperni is still small, but it’s important to start supporting people,” Vaillant said, adding, “we’ve been especially worried about education in this time, with kids not being able to go to school, and we wanted to connect [what we do] to technology. We feel if we have the right balance between tech and the human side we can go far.”
There are plenty of downsides to the pandemic, but the Coperni designers see the upsides, too. “One of the good things of our difficult world,” says Meyer, “is I feel that people are going to help each other more.”
