French designer Coperni uses NASA's silica aerogel to create a bag made of 99% AIR

• The Air Swipe Bag is made of NASA’s advanced silica aerogel nanomaterial 
• The bag weighs only 33 grams despite being able to hold an iPhone

If paying for something that is 99 per cent air doesn’t sound like a good deal, then this bag might not be for you.

French designer Coperni has made a bag out of NASA’s silica aerogel nano-material.

This space-age material has been used to capture stardust and insulate the Mars rover, but now it is being used for high fashion.

Made of one of the lightest materials known to science, the whole bag only weighs 33 grams, slightly more than six sheets of A4 paper.

But even though it seems a little delicate, Coperni insists that it can still hold the weight of your iPhone.

French designer Coperni uses NASA’s silica aerogel to create a bag made of 99% AIR

In a post on Instagram, Coperni showed off the incredible bag, which has been dubbed the Air Swipe Bag.

In the post, you can see that the bag is translucent and cloudy, with whips of white running through the material like trapped smoke.

However, on social media, many fashion fans have been sceptical of the bag’s practicality.

One commenter wrote: ‘What can you put in it and does it break when you drop it’.

Another sceptical commenter asked: ‘Does it serve the function of a bag tho??’

However, as much as the material looks like a cloud, the designers promise that it will be able to hold at least some of your things.

Responding to one commenter, Coperni wrote: ‘It can hold an iPhone’.

With the iPhone 15 Max weighing 221 grams, this would mean the bag could hold more than six times its own weight.

On social media, some questioned whether this light material could be practical but Coperni insists that the bag can at least carry a phone

Developed by Professor Ioannis Michaloudis, of the American University of Cyprus, the bag makes use of the nanomaterial silica aerogel.

In the post, Coperni writes: ‘The Air Swipe bag is made of 99% pure nothing and 1% glass, the glass of the future.’

Aerogels are full of pores at the nano-level, like a sponge filled with incredibly small holes.

These pores trap air, creating a delicate but non-fragile material that is both solid and extremely light.

The bag is made of the same material that NASA used to capture dust from a comet in the Stardust mission

Aerogels were initially developed by NASA in the 1930s as a new form of insulation to help craft withstand the intense conditions of space.

To understand how this material is made, imagine making a jelly out of powdered gelatine and water.

When you combine this polymer and solvent and let the mixture set you would get a gel of jelly.

Normally, if you heated up the jelly till all the water had evaporated all that would be left would be powdered gelatin again.

But aerogels manage to keep their gel-like structure even after all of the solvent has been removed; creating materials that are stronger and lighter than anything else.

Coperni calls this the ‘lightest solid on planet Earth.

The space-age bag weighs only 33 grams in total thanks to being made 99 per cent of air and only 1 per cent out of silica based glass

The bag is the largest piece to have been made out of aerogel according to the designer

However, the material’s incredible capabilities don’t stop there.

As Coperni point out in their post, this NASA-developed material is capable of withstanding temperatures up to 21,632 °F (12,000 °C) and a pressure of 4,000 times its weight.

While this might not come in very handy in a bag, it is very useful for missions in space.

NASA has used more advanced versions of this material to insulate spacecraft and landers including the Mars rover.

But its most notable use has been to catch particles from a comet during the Stardust mission in 1999.

Coperni says: ‘This Air Swipe bag is the biggest ever object made of this space technology nanomaterial.’

The bag was launched at the Fall/Winter 2024 collection but Coperni have not said if it will be commercially available

The Air Swipe Bag was made as part of the designer’s Fall/Winter 2024 collection.

Although the bag did appear in the ‘ready to wear’ collection show in Paris, Coperni has not yet announced whether the bag will available to the public or how much it might cost.

MailOnline has contacted Coperni for additional information.

However, this is not Coperni’s first use of space-age materials in their fashion offerings.

Last year, the designer unveiled a limited edition bag crafted from resin and moon rock found in France in 1968.

Coperni said that the Mini Meteorite Swipe Bag ‘combines archeology, design, and classical and primitive art.’

However, at an eye-watering price of 40,000 euros (£35,000), this price might be too steep even for a piece of a 55,000-year-old meteorite.

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