The short version: Coperni, the Paris label behind the Swipe bag, is closing. Its founders have announced its liquidation, FashionUnited reported on 4 November, five months after a Paris court put it into receivership. Coperni blames unpaid sums owed by its own majority shareholder, not weak sales, which makes this a story about ownership rather than demand.
Coperni SAS, the Paris ready-to-wear and accessories house founded in 2013 by Arnaud Vaillant and Sébastien Meyer, is ceasing operations and has been placed into compulsory liquidation, FashionUnited reported on 4 November 2026. The two founders announced the end of the brand on Instagram, saying that despite all their efforts “no solution has been found”, and thanking their teams, partner factories and customers.
The liquidation ends a rescue process that began on 11 June, when the Paris commercial court opened receivership proceedings, a redressement judiciaire, to protect the company. According to FashionUnited’s June report, the court set the date Coperni stopped being able to pay its debts at 29 May and gave it an observation period running to 11 December. It did not get that far.
Coperni’s own explanation has not changed since June. The company told Vogue Business, as cited by FashionUnited, that its cash problems came from money owed by Tomorrow, its majority shareholder and exclusive distributor, and not from a slowdown in sales. That is Coperni’s account. FashionUnited’s report of the closure carried no response from Tomorrow, and Faz has not seen one.
How a rescue turned into a closure
The receivership was meant to buy time for a buyer, and the offers that arrived were close to symbolic. Milano Finanza reported on 8 October, citing documents reviewed by FashionNetwork, that three bids had reached the court. Aa Investments, a Hong Kong fund, offered €10,000 for the stock, archive, designs and websites. Private investor Victor Bughin offered €400,000 and proposed keeping the 26 employees in the short term. Private investor Philippe Sayada made a preliminary offer of €2 in total: one euro for the tangible assets, one for the intangible.
One detail in that report matters more than the numbers. According to Milano Finanza, the Coperni name itself sat with a separate company, Coperni UK, so any buyer of Coperni SAS would have needed a licensing agreement to use it. The Paris company held the people, the archive and the know-how. It did not hold the name on the label.
The pressure had been visible for most of the year. Coperni skipped Paris Fashion Week in March amid tensions with its shareholder, according to FashionUnited, and in the same month Tomorrow was itself acquired by Progetto 11, the Italian parent of e-commerce group The Level Group, Modaes reported. The founders said in June that court protection would let Coperni keep creating and protect its teams, and that they wanted to regain control of the company.
Thirteen years, two starts and one very famous bag
Coperni’s fame was always out of proportion to its size. Vaillant and Meyer launched it in 2013, paused it between 2015 and 2018 while they ran Courrèges, and relaunched it in 2019 with backing from Tomorrow, according to Modaes and nss magazine. The Swipe bag, named after the swipe-to-unlock gesture on a phone, arrived in the Fall-Winter 2019/20 collection, Istituto Marangoni’s journal notes, and became the house’s calling card. The 2024 Air Swipe, made from silica aerogel and described as 99% air, kept it in the headlines.
The shows did the rest: a dress sprayed on to a model live in 2022, a show at Disneyland Paris in October 2024. A business with 26 employees in Paris, by Bughin’s offer, was carrying a global profile that most houses ten times its size never reach.
The Faz read: a label undone by its own structure
The plain reading is that Coperni did not run out of customers. It ran out of control over its own money. When a young label signs an exclusive distribution deal with a company that is also its majority owner, the cash from every stockist flows through someone else’s accounts. If that partner stops paying, the designer has no second channel to fall back on and no shareholder independent enough to step in. Coperni’s account, if it holds, is a clear case of that structure failing.
The split between the company and the name makes it starker. A label can be loved, photographed and copied, and still end up in a position where the studio that creates it can be bought for two euros while the name lives somewhere else. We wrote recently about what happens to a fashion brand after its owner sells it; the risk here is the mirror image, a name that outlives the people who made it mean something. If “Coperni” reappears under a licence, it would be fair to ask who is designing it and where it is made before paying for it.
It is worth being honest about the other side. Viral fame is not a business model either, and a brand built on spectacle needs unusually stable finance behind it. But the evidence available points at the cap table, not the clothes.
If you own, sold or ordered Coperni
The practical consequences depend on what you hold. Take them one at a time.
One. If you own a Swipe or another Coperni piece, nothing about it changes today, but two things will over time. There will be no more brand repairs or replacement parts from the original house, so look after hardware and edges now. And closures tend to bring out both nervous sellers and counterfeiters on resale sites; if you are buying, check the piece the way you would any designer bag, using our step-by-step secondhand bag check.
Two. If you placed an order directly with Coperni that has not arrived, contact your card provider rather than waiting. In the UK, Citizens Advice says Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act covers credit card purchases where a single item cost more than £100 and no more than £30,000, and chargeback can be used for debit cards; PayPal disputes must be opened within 180 days of payment. Orders through a department store or online retailer are that retailer’s responsibility, not Coperni’s.
Three. If you are tempted by end-of-line stock at department stores and marketplaces, buy only what you would wear without the story attached. Discounted pieces from a closed house are not an investment, and no one can say how resale prices for Coperni will move.
What happens next
The liquidator now takes over the sale of whatever Coperni SAS still owns, its stock, archive and equipment, and the payment of creditors in their legal order. The question to watch is the name: whether Coperni UK licenses it to a buyer, and whether Vaillant and Meyer have any part in what comes after. Both founders have relaunched once before.
Where this leaves you
Coperni’s collapse is a reminder that the health of a small label sits in its ownership and distribution, not only in its sales. Before you commit serious money to a young brand, it is reasonable to ask who owns it, who sells it and whether the founders still control both. The independents that last usually do.
The next move is yours.
Sources: FashionUnited, 4 November · FashionUnited, receivership · Milano Finanza · Modaes · Citizens Advice
