Greek researcher Ioannis Michaloudis might be the only person on Earth who can shape aerogel — the lightest solid known to science — into a three-dimensional object. Originally developed by NASA to “catch stardust,” aerogel is 99.8% air and priced like a precious stone. As Michaloudis himself says, “Even NASA doesn’t know how to make it three-dimensional. That’s my trade secret.”
If space science never needed to sculpt aerogel, fashion certainly does. Enter Coperni. At Paris Fashion Week 2024, the brand unveiled the Air Swipe: a handbag made of 99% air and 1% silica. Online, it was roasted as “the toilet seat bag,” but in person it shimmered with a spectral pale blue — as if plucked straight out of Arrival’s sci-fi mise-en-scène. The bag weighs just 35 grams. The brand’s punchline goes, “It still fits your iPhone.”
Here, technoaesthetics gets literal. A material designed for cosmic dust collectors is retooled to carry your phone. For Coperni it’s a design coup. For Michaloudis, it’s “air sculpture.” Aerogel’s hazy translucency, he says, “suggests rather than reinforces what’s missing.” That missing-ness is the real hook. Humans notice absence more than presence — a crack in porcelain, a tear in fabric, a gap begging to be filled. Sometimes we glue it shut; sometimes, like in kintsugi, we highlight it with gold — one hides the absence, the other emphasizes it. . Either way, imagination sneaks in through the crack and materializes in the gap. Contemporary technology and artistic creation too, rely on such spaces of “lack” and “imagination.”
Fashion thrives on this tension. It is an industry addicted to the new and novelty. Our resistance to decay and death drives us to constantly reinvent. Nostalgia appear as a brief indulgence, and we later return to the studio to chase the next “new.” Coperni’s airbag raises a bigger question about aethestics of fashion’s future: If air itself can become luxury, what does that do to our sense of value? Are we really ready to pay thousands for the rawest of free materials — air itself — or does this open the door to a more sustainable, post-materialist fashion future? And what new instruments might aerogel yet produce?
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson, citing Merleau-Ponty, once posed a cognitive riddle: “Imagine a blind man with a cane. Where does his self begin? At the tip of the cane, or at the handle?” The point is clear: tools don’t just extend our bodies, they extend our sensitivity — our aesthesis. Glasses, prosthetics, even mirrors. We sense the world coming toward us, and our embodied condition urges us to search for ways to exist meaningfully within it — to test out new technological modes. This is how sensitivity stretches outward into artifacts, incorporating them into our perceptual system: the cane, the prosthetic, the device seamlessly identified with our agency. For Kant, imagination occupies the space between sensibility and cognition. It mediates between raw input from the outside world and the structures we use to organize that input — including information received through tools.
Imagination has always been technology’s greatest sponsor. Faced with survival anxiety, humans depend on imagination as both a neurological reflex and an inventive tool. The desire for connection and the fear of loneliness once drove us to invent language, writing, telecommunications, and image-production technologies. Even the mirror is a proto-medium, letting us perceive the self without words. What emerges is the extraordinary human capacity to generate, refine, and intensify external sensitivity. Fashion and art, too, belong to this lineage: it’s not mere surface, but a prosthesis of perception — scanning, organizing, and reshaping our relations with the world.
