Coperni Turns Heads: Bella Hadid and the Spray-On Dress
Coperni Turns Heads: Bella Hadid and the Spray-On Dress
By Anjali Krishna
Ok, I know I’m getting to this really late, but did y'all see Coperni’s Spring Summer 2023 Show? Even if the answer is no, I’m pretty sure you saw a part of it. Probably the part where Bella Hadid came out from backstage in nothing but underwear, got a dress sprayed onto her by a team of people carrying suspicious looking instruments, and then traipsed down the runway. To be honest it wasn’t until she began her walk that my jaw dropped, thinking to myself, ‘five minute old fabric shouldn’t be able to move like that.’ Immediately I was filled with questions and the small academic who has taken up permanent residence in my frontal lobe (hello fellow STEM majors) was trying to answer them.
The most poignant question: how on earth did they unstick it from her body? (or as my friend so eloquently demanded, ‘how the fuck did she get it off?!’) For the fabric to hang like, well, fabric, it couldn’t be adhered to her flesh. Even when wearing the most body-con of body-con dresses there are still a couple microns of space between you and the material. If not, you’d be glued in. In the seminal 2009 film Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, Flint Lockwood has this exact problem with his prototype invention spray-on shoes – which he can never take off. It turns out that the answer to my question lies within the nature of the spray-on fabric itself, rather than in any special technique of the dress artists. The liquid that Coperni used to synthesize this dress was developed in partnership with Manel Torres, who founded Fabrican, or “fabric in a can,” in 2003 (sorry Flint, you were six years too late). Manel recalls that he was inspired by silly string and cobwebs, both substances that begin as a liquid and then form a solid on contact with air. The transformation of these liquids into long fibers – either for web slinging, or, in this case, to act as fabric – results from the liquid being put into contact with a jet of pressurized air. To achieve this in Bella’s transformation the Coperni artists used giant airbrushes. The airbrush contains a reservoir full of the fabric fluid connected to a main tube that runs through the body of the machine. As air is sucked through this tube, it pulls the fluid from the reservoir with it. On contact with air it becomes solid, and both the air and the newly formed fabric fibers leave the airbrush.
The liquid itself is formed by taking fibers normally used in fabric – cottons, synthetics, wools, even mohair – and breaking each strand into short, individual pieces that can be suspended in a liquid. When the liquid containing these pieces passes out of the reservoir and touches the air, they re-link with each other, and these new longer fibers bind together to form a mat, which, when it becomes thick enough, is essentially a fabric.
Ok, well thats pretty cool, but it still doesn’t address how “the fuck she got it off.” Turns out that's the easy part. She could just pull it over her head. Fabrican reacts with the oils on your skin upon contact, causing it to be completely non-sticky and removable.
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Even though Fabrican was created nineteen years ago, its use in Coperni’s show and the huge positive reaction it garnered show that the invention’s best days may still be ahead. Designers are always looking for new material to play with, and the fact that this technology was exhibited in a ready-to-wear collection suggests that it may be on its way to widespread use. Other pieces in the show, while not nearly as interesting or experimental, seemed to be channeling the ephemeral nature of Fabrican, looking like they had just been draped, pulled, and twisted into shape backstage. Like someone could pull out one pin or knot and the whole garment would fall back into shapelessness, like Fabrican re-dissolving into a liquid.
Many fashion critics compared Coperni’s performance to the Alexander McQueen Fall Winter 1999 show, where model Shalom Harlow was sprayed with black and yellow paint by robotic arms, creating a custom dress right on the runway. Apart from essentials though, the two couldn’t be more different. Shalom writhed and twisted as she was painted, eventually stumbling off her rotating platform with a defeated look in her eyes. It was pure performance art, exhibiting the relationship between man and machine. The Coperni show was an exhibition of a new technology. Bella stood still, as though to not take away from the dress, and a couple of other Fabrican tops were shown in the lineup, clearly suggesting that these clothes had some place in the future of the brand. The McQueen dress, on the other hand, was an anomaly in its collection, and only recently has spray paint re-emerged as a motif in the Fall 2022 Menswear Collection.
The rest of the Coperni show was pretty underwhelming, but I get the sense that it doesn’t matter. In the long term, it’s likely that the final performance will be the only thing people will remember, and I’m excited to see where the label will take its Fabrican partnership.
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