The New Guard: Peter Copping
Designer Peter Copping quietly reinvents Nina Ricci’s romantic legacy for the next generation.
By
Susannah Frankel
Photographs by
Benoit Peverelli
May 2012
On a gray winter afternoon in Paris this past January, the Nina Ricci flagship, located on a suitably grand corner of Avenue *Montaigne, was a *glittering jewelry box. Ivory mannequins in emerald green tweeds, ruffled cocktail dresses, and fluffy marabou coats in shades of dusty pink gyrated on tiny pedestals in the windows. Inside, the newly arrived spring clothing hung next to overstuffed baskets of lace-edged lingerie. Prominently displayed were Lalique crystal bottles of L’Air du Temps—the house’s legendary floral fragrance, composed by master perfumer Francis Fabron in 1948.
Far above street level, in a small office off one side of his design studio, *Peter Copping, 45, Nina Ricci’s artistic director, was sipping tea. He had a serious cold, caught on his way back from Morocco, he said, where he had been with his partner, Rambert Rigaud—who used to work as studio director at Yves Saint Laurent and is now training to be a florist—seeking out Tamegroute pottery, among other things. (“It’s very rustic, very heavy, and has a beautiful green glaze,” Copping explained.) He was wearing chinos, a navy-and-white-striped T-shirt, and a gray cashmere cardigan. Copping told me he buys almost all of his wardrobe from 45RPM, a Japanese brand known for carefully crafted staples—and occasionally from Comme des Garçons or Ralph Lauren—and balked wryly at the suggestion that he might one day *apply his considerable credentials to men’s wear *design. “Does a man want to say, ‘Oh, I’m wearing Nina Ricci’?” he mused, deadpanning: “I think that would be quite a difficult fit. I find that when men are too ‘done,’ there’s a slight embarrassment factor. Do you know what I mean?”
Of all the French heritage names in existence today, Nina Ricci is indeed the most unashamedly feminine—a characteristic that applies to everything from the clothes to the soft-focus advertising campaigns. But despite the fact that images of models like *Malgosia Bela and Raquel Zimmermann in liquid *floor-sweeping gowns are by now firmly *established in fashion’s collective subconscious, until relatively recently, Nina *Ricci was known first and foremost for L’Air du Temps, which remains one of France’s best-selling perfumes more than half a century after its launch.
It is unlikely that many people outside the fashion industry have heard of the Englishman behind the label’s current regeneration. After working at Louis Vuitton for a dozen years—most recently as Marc Jacobs’s women’s wear studio director—*Copping stepped quietly into the limelight three years ago, when Nina Ricci president Manuel Puig hired him to revamp the brand. That was not an easy proposition. The house had already been through four *designers in the *decade before Copping’s arrival—*including *Olivier Theyskens, whose sales figures failed to equal the critical acclaim garnered by his work.
“Sometimes designers have their own agendas, which I understand, but this house was not strong enough to support that,” Puig told me in Paris. “We had to reconstruct the codes, we had to look at the past, and we had to be very precise. Peter and I spoke the same language.” Copping concurred: “I wanted to go back to the couture essence of the brand. But I think the Nina Ricci customer has a sense of frivolity too.”
Perfectly in sync with the prevailing mood in fashion—l’air du temps, *indeed—Copping’s spring collection was replete with references to the elevated craft of haute couture. “Our clients really do want good quality,” he said. “And if something references haute couture, well, then that’s a no-brainer for
them. We do quite a lot of special orders, and you have to remember that 25,000 euros for some people is the same as 2.50 euros for others. If you have that amount of money, fair enough. But the one thing I really like is when people enjoy dressing up.”
Above all, Copping continued, Nina Ricci is “typically French—sexy but not vulgar.” Though he has lived in Paris for 18 years, his status as an expat gives him the distance required to subvert the clichéd jolie madame aesthetic—to transform it into something both pretty and witty. “It drives the ateliers crazy sometimes that, when things are too perfectly made, I’ll ask them to go off and dump them in water or crush them. Sometimes we put the dresses in the steam press”—he paused for a moment, before adding mischievously: “like in [cult eighties TV soap] Prisoner: Cell Block H.”
Maria “Nina” Ricci, the daughter of a ribbon maker, was Italian by birth. Her outstanding skills as a seamstress led to her working as a premier at Raffin, one of Paris’s most feted houses, by the time she was 25, in the early years of the 20th century. In 1932, at age 49—and with a son, Robert, by her husband, jeweler Luigi Ricci—she founded her own label. Nina’s technical virtuosity and respect for elegance coupled with Robert’s pioneering marketing prowess proved to be a winning combination. Aimed at the comparatively larger crowd of society’s well-heeled women more than at the smaller orbit of movie stars and princesses, the Nina Ricci label was as timeless as it was chic, and it soon acquired a client base to rival that of any other major French house.
Copping, true to his word—and in only six seasons—has reinvigorated the label with that original lighthearted élan. “When you look at a brand like Chanel,” he said, “it’s defined by the tweed suit; by the big easy pants that Mademoiselle Chanel used to wear; by the symbols—the camellia, the pearls. Saint Laurent has Le Smoking and the safari jacket. As a company, Nina Ricci has a long and strong history—but what Maria Ricci left was the legacy of a style, more than iconic pieces as such.”
they get hired one day, and the next day they have to put on a full collection..Doesn't really give a designer much time to really understand the original style/look/feel of the house.
