Coperni just debuted its new Air Swipe Bag at their Fall/Winter ’24 ready-to-wear show, made of 99 percent air and 1 percent glass. The bag only weighs 33 grams and is 27 x 16 x 6 cm in size. The fashion house used NASA‘s nanomaterial silica aerogel to create the portable CD player-looking bag.
Coperni co-developed the new Air Swipe Bag with Professor Ioannis Michaloudis. The material used is a highly delicate and non-fragile nanomaterial. NASA used it in its Stardust mission, the first spacecraft to bring samples from a comet to Earth in 1999.
“This very delicate (and non-fragile) nanomaterial has been used by NASA to capture stardust: because it can withstand extreme heat (1200o Celsius) and a pressure of 4000 times its weight. This Air Swipe bag is the biggest ever object made of this space technology nanomaterial,” explained the studio on their Instagram page.
The designers of the bag told Vogue UK that the accessory was named after the unlock function on the iPhone and that it took 15 prototypes to achieve the final design.
Appearing almost like a cloud, the bag is the biggest piece to ever be created from the nanomaterial. According to NASA, aerogel is one of the lightest solid materials on Earth. It is created by combining polymer with solvent. This mixture forms a gel. The liquid is then removed or extracted from the mixture to be replaced with air.
Certainly, innovation’s advancements do not miss any industry. From sports to fashion and sustainability, the newest technology doesn’t stop surprising us every day. And Coperni’s Air Swipe Bag is no exception. On the contrary, it is another example of how advanced our society has become and what we can achieve by harnessing the power of technology.