COPERNI: BUZZ AT A PRICE
Some bankruptcies go beyond the mere wreck of a company. With an almost cruel irony, they expose the blindness of those who claim to steer the destiny of French fashion. Coperni, a house once held up on a pedestal, celebrated for its technological feats and welcomed into the official calendar of the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, is today ceasing operations. The curtain falls, the spotlights go out, and behind the stage effects there emerges an old truth the great strategists seem to have forgotten: a fashion house is not built on spectacle and press releases.
So here are the visionaries of French fashion, confronted with a reality less photogenic than a runway show: that of accounts, creditors, and companies that vanish. By confusing media buzz with economic solidity, one ends up mistaking a firework display for a sunrise.
For the real scandal is not that a young house fails. Entrepreneurship carries its risks, and its founders deserve respect for having attempted the adventure. The scandal is this caste of decision-makers who claim to identify the houses of the future, while leaving in the shadows French designers who work, produce, employ, and sustain genuine craftsmanship. They prefer a dress sprayed onto a model to a house capable of building a wardrobe. They applaud the performance and forget the garment. They celebrate the moment without ever asking about the morning after.
The Fédération should nonetheless remember that it is not a communications agency tasked with running a contest for the prettiest publicity stunt. Its vocation should be to defend an industry, a heritage, a standard of excellence, and above all a future. But how can it claim to prepare that future when its selection process seems at times more seduced by the impact and sex appeal of an image than by the longevity of a business?
Coperni disappears, and with it collapses a certain idea of success manufactured through visibility. Let those who hand out certificates of modernity reflect on this lesson: a Fashion Week can manufacture a celebrity in a single evening, but it does not necessarily manufacture a viable company.
As for Monsieur Le Marrant, our great fashion economist, let us wish him a revolutionary instrument for his next selections: a calculator. For by dint of choosing houses for their ability to get people talking, one ends up staging a parade of filed balance sheets.
FM