Coperni's PFW SS25 Show At Disneyland Paris Really Was Where Dreams Came True
Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Mickey Mouse. Pyrotechnics. Rollercoasters. Lasers. Kitsch, cartoons and Kylie Jenner. Trust master showmen, Coperni’s Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant, to close fashion month’s four-city tour and take it out with a bang (or several, fireworks).
It says something about the industry’s love for Coperni, and anticipation surrounding their shows that for their SS25 outing, the duo whisked a tired fashion pack 50 minutes outside of the city – and a world away from the Louvre where penultimate show of the season, Louis Vuitton, was held – to Disneyland Paris (the first brand to do so).
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By this point in the season, most just want to sleep – ordering room service in silence is the most sociable you want to be. But whaddyaknow, one glimpse of a waving Mickey, Pluto and Chipmunks – an orchestral version of Tale as Old as Time in the air – and it can melt the heart and spike the energy levels of even the most unimpressible fashion crowd (it ain’t called the Magic Kingdom for nothing). There is something deeply surreal about seeing serious critics and aloof cool kids getting all giddy over a lit-up pink castle – the 50+ photos of it on my camera-roll this morning tell you what you need to know about my personal levels of excitement.
So, before the show even started, Meyer and Vaillant had achieved their stated goal of sharing ‘our collective sense of wonder and joy – a sense of awe of what humans hold within us’. This has been a season that positively reclaimed the word ‘childish’, and it found a fun conclusion in the choice of location, the boys musing that for provincial French kids a trip to Disneyland was often their first experience of Paris. Given the sugar-rush atmosphere, there’s clearly something in this nostalgia kick.
The actual show part of the spectacle, models emerging from the Sleeping Beauty Castle, was divided into three parts. The first, park tribes, was a celebration of youth and naïveté. Vintage Disney T-shirts were mixed in with modern iterations; sparkle remixed with denim and very lightly worn Victoriana accents (ruffles, bloomer shorts). Then – bam! – a theatrical clatter of thunder and lightning to announce the villains section, starring Irina Shayk in a cut-away leather trench and a swaggering Paloma Elsesser in grunge-glam black slip. And finally, perhaps inevitably, the princesses conclusion. There was Jill Korteve in a shredded caramel dress (very Ariel), Lila Moss in a transparent mini scattered with cloud-like corsages, and finally – a woman living a very 21st-century fairytale – Jenner closing the show in a black ballgown.
You’ll know that by now, of course – pictures and videos of Disney and Kylie and the rest were promptly posted to social media accounts. Meyer and Vaillant understand better than anyone the power that a show – a proper show – can have to catapult a brand to a different level of recognition, most notably the instantly-viral SS23 show in which Bella Hadid was spray-painted into a dress live on stage. That might have been a pivotal moment for the brand, but ask any pre-Bella fans and attendees (I am one) and they’ll tell you that the boys always knew how to put on a show (SS22’s hemp field and AW22’s school locker shows were both excellent fun). Good for them. Coperni has established a distinctive buzzy, sexy, slightly sci-fi inflected look – the Swipe bags, the asymmetry, the twisted tops and curved heel boots – that deserves to be amplified.
A Coperni party is always a good one, but – with rides and rollercoasters left open – even hardened hedonists will admit that Disneyland’s will take some beating. And so it was – better judgement aside – time to for a whirl on Hyperspace Mountain. Seemingly everyone was in the mood: ELLE UK contributing editor Camille Charrière, and longtime Coperni girl, was in the queue, SSENSE’s head of content Steff Yotka wiped away a tear (the happy, fully-adrenalised type) on disembarking. PR mastermind, Lucien Pagès, one of Paris’s best connected and hardest working men, promised earlier that he would be hitting it up – a memorable, invigorating way to round out fashion month (I wouldn’t have blamed him if he’d preferred a nap, but hey). Much like the night itself.
And, then, reluctantly – while the party raged in the Magic Kingdom – near midnight it was time for this writer to hit the road. What can I say? I had to get to the people carrier before it turned back into a pumpkin.
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