A towering black obelisk—or maybe a half-flipped Asterix–loomed over us in the far, far, away Aubervillier TV soundstage to which Coperni had transported us as its late-night space. The obelisk (very Kubrick) lit up as John Williams’s The Conversation from Spielberg’s Close Encounters of The Third Kind played.
“The collection is a whole sci-fi tribute,” confirmed Arnaud Vaillant backstage. Star-soled shoes left otherworldly footprints beneath ‘flying saucer’ dresses with Mars Attacks skirts. Cable knits were vertically sliced in order to create a swooshy hyperspace blur. There were gold-layered silver foil space blanket dresses and skirts that shed little scraps of space junk as they orbited that obelisk. The models’ hair was styled as if slicked with Xenomorph slime, and some fantastic articulated faux-talons mirrored Xenomorph manicures. Faux fur coats and bags in terrestrial tonal browns and beige were edged in spurts of green and blue: alien blood. A fitted black top and white dress were patterned with poppers that echoed the charging inputs applied to the future-human battery packs in the Matrix movies. Models carried micro handbags in Ziploc evidence bags, a la Mulder with an artifact. A white dress came with a long sheer skirt below an attached white shirt in crisp white cotton: Scully gone wild. A clutch bag was modeled after a clipboard binder: literally (almost) the X-Files.
Every compelling sci-fi narrative—especially if invasion-related—demands its Pandora: the scientist who understands what’s coming before the rest of us do. Tonight that role was played uncannily well by professor Ioannis Michaloudis, who backstage explained how he’d created a version of Coperni’s emblematic Swipe bag in a mix of 99 percent air, 1 percent silicon nano-something—apparently a material used by NASA to “catch stardust.” Fittingly, all this went totally over my head, but the bag looked cool. It was toted onto the runway by Leon Dame dressed after Jude Law in Gattaca.
Although the two cameramen who orbited the models as they walked (for the stream, of course) were vexingly distracting IRL this was otherwise an entertainingly immersive space opera fashion show. The two final dresses came framed in feathered hoops at the shoulder along the lines of Star Trek’s transporter aura. The truth was in here: Coperni has the technology.