Parisian fashion label Coperni made quite the splash last week when it unveiled its Spring/Summer 2025 collection at Disneyland Paris. The show was presented in front of Sleeping Beauty’s iconic castle at the French theme park and featured a series of garments and accessories inspired by the world of Disney. Among those Disney-inspired pieces was the Ariel Swipe Bag, a compact handbag with a seemingly simple profile, but whose production is innovative and gravity-defying.
Coperni’s Ariel Swipe Bag, inspired by the undersea world of mermaids, is not only 3D printed, it is 3D printed in a vat of a water-based gel from a pliable silicone material. To the eye, the process appears to create the purse in mid-air, as each layer of the curable recycled silicone that is injected using a fine needle is suspended in the hydrogel matrix. The technology used to create the designer handbag is called Rapid Liquid Print and was originally developed by MIT’s self-assembly lab (a spin-out by the same name as the technology was founded in 2015 and recently secured $7 million in funding).
Rapid Liquid Print describes its unique technology in the following way: “Unlike traditional 3D printing that builds objects layer by layer and often requires supports, RLP extrudes material into a gel in a non-planar, support-free manner. This enables faster production, smoother finishes, and the creation of larger objects without typical size constraints.” The spinout’s technology is currently capable of printing platinum-cured RTV silicones in a variety of shore hardnesses and has applications in the medical, automotive and consumer sectors.
In the case of Coperni’s application, not only was the RLP process in line with the Ariel Swipe Bag’s mermaid theme (or perhaps even the inspiration behind it), it also enabled the company to produce a 3D printed product with minimal post-processing needs. According to Rapid Liquid Print, silicone parts need only be rinsed before use. It really takes “ready-to-wear” to another level.
Interestingly, the Ariel Swipe Bag is just the latest in Coperni’s exploration of innovative materials and production methods. Just this past spring, the company revealed another version of the Swipe bag made from 99% air and 1% glass (specifically, NASA’s nanomaterial silica aerogel, reportedly the lightest solid on Earth).
“We met with Disney about two years ago,” said Arnaud Vaillant in an interview with Wired about how the collaboration came to be. “The most exciting part for us was to bring more innovation to this world. The most important thing for Mr. Walt Disney was imagination and making the impossible possible through technology—which is what Coperni is all about.” You can see how the bag was made in this video.
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