Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant found the most precious (55,000-year-old) space relic the French authorities had to offer and transformed it into an Instagrammable handbag. For all its scientific value, the lunar rock, which was discovered in the south of France in 1968, is really a decrepit husk of a thing, pocked in all kinds of calloused textures. But such is Coperni’s commitment to making strange and dystopian connections between technology and fashion. Last season, the duo managed to airbrush a latex dress onto the naked body of Bella Hadid, which despite being quite a bewitching thing to watch in real life, popularised cynical hot takes and the word “gimmick” on Twitter.
But Meyer and Vaillant, who are seemingly fed-up with people calling their work concept-thin, decided to give this season’s showgoers a 17th-century fable to decode (which is precisely the kind of thing that fashion people want to be doing on a Friday night during the final week of the AW23 season). Coperni really said: ‘Fine! If you’re so bored of seeing something fun at fashion week, then please read this old story about a wolf and a lamb, which was written to provide an opaque moral lesson to children on the tireless extremes tyrants will go through in order to get their end of the bargain.’ To cut a very long story short, the wolf eats the lamb after making up various excuses and refusing to reason.
Perhaps that explains all the four-legged rovers that tried to woo audience members before stealing Lila Moss’ handbag and snatching a jacket from Rianne Van Rompaey’s shoulders to reveal a skimpy LBD beneath. Other models paced through the space in metal-clamped columns, twisted-leather crop tops, and paillette-strewn mini dresses. With their green eyes glowing like radioactive racoons, the robodogs were enlisted from Boston Dynamics’ troop of mobile robots, which are traditionally used to inspect factories, so it was quite charming to see them “dance” for a bit and let out their inner freaks. For Coperni, these guileless pups were proof of how man and technology can exist in harmony – so perhaps Twitter nerds and people who like to be entertained can also do the same.
