The last 20 months away from the runways prompted us all to ask big questions of fashion. So now that we are back at it, where are fashion’s big answers? So far there have been very few at the spring 2022 shows: Most houses, especially the biggest, are staying in their lane.
Coperni’s Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer negotiated this issue elegantly by naming their collection Spring Summer 2033. As Vaillant observed, “The industry is a nightmare now. But we want to escape and have fun.” By setting their collection not next season but next decade they were at least acknowledging the issues of now while simultaneously evading them.
Kicking a problem into the long grass is always tempting, as was the odor that filled the show space thanks to 70,000 stems of hemp from which the set was constructed. The hemp was related to a sustainable fabric initiative in which the designers are involved: they said once the show was done this aged hemp was going to be used to make gin—another noble initiative.
Through these plants Coperni’s 2033 crew walked a sand runway as if, perhaps, making their way down through the dunes to a beach bar like the mighty Sa Trinxa in Ibiza, an island the designers said was a contender for this collection’s imagined location. Tailoring in a beachy environment is often as incongruous as boardshorts in a boardroom, but here Vaillant and Meyer applied this pillar of their work in way that blurred its inherent formality, both through their ingenious deconstructions of the tailoring itself—as in a jacket sliced vertically away above the armpit and suspended on the body by an acetate chain halter neck—as well as the pieces they placed against it.
A print collage that included images of Felix the Cat, the yin and yang sign, alien faces and Beavis and Butt-Head was like some ’90s dropout scrapbook. It was used on camp shirts for men and a slip dress hemmed with three layers of the whorled, vaguely molluscoid edging detail that recurred on bra-tops and skirts. A swirly, vaguely psychedelic print was applied to the swimwear and shirting that punctuated much of the first, twistedly conventional section of the show. As we edged to evening, certain pieces began to shimmer a little on the eye: This was thanks not to the odor but the treatment given to French lace worn as pants against a bra-top of Indian seashells or another slip dress. This heritage-rooted futurism was true to their Ghesquière-mentored roots, and repeated in a new bag whose shape was inspired by the iPhone photos app icon, named the Origami. Eve Jobs, daughter of Steve, was making her runway debut here but carried the Swipe instead. This Coperni collection might have prevaricated on those Big Questions, but it definitely delivered answers for next summer sybarites in search of wearable pleasures.
