American University of Cyprus professor co-develops 99% air designer handbag (video)

Professor Ioannis Michaloudis, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the American University of Cyprus, has co-developed a groundbreaking bag, 99% of which is made of air, with Parisian fashion house Coperni.

Coperni debuts its new Air Swipe Bag in its FW24 show, with the unique accessory made of 99 percent air and 1 percent glass. The Parisian fashion house uses NASA’s nanomaterial silica aerogel, described as the lightest solid on planet Earth, to create the bag.

Coperni’s new Air Swipe Bag weighs only 33 grams, sincet NASA’s nanomaterial silica aerogel is a highly delicate and non-fragile nanomaterial. The space agency used it in its stardust mission, the first spacecraft to bring samples from a comet to Earth in 1999, since it can withstand extreme heat of up to 1,200 degrees celsius and a pressure of 4000 times its weight. Coperni toys with this idea by transforming NASA’s aerogel into a misty and cloudy Air Swipe bag, which is dubbed the biggest ever object made of this space technology nanomaterial. Coperni has yet to reveal the availability of its new drop, unveiled during its FW24 show.

The accessory has caught the attention of Vogue France, among other fashion trendsetters. Professor Michaloudis can be seen with Coperni's Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant in the video below.

According to the American University of Cyprus' website, Dr. Ioannis Michaloudis is a visual artist-researcher and academic, internationally acknowledged as a leading researcher in Art&Science, and the first to research the application of the nanomaterial silica aerogel in visual arts and design.

His career began in Paris, at Sorbonne University, where he presented his thesis on Visual Arts in 1998 on the “Elastic Arts”. After receiving a Fulbright Award, in 2001 he undertook postdoctoral research on art and nanotechnology at MIT where he started his research on the application of silica aerogel in fine art projects.

He had a solo exhibit in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens and in 2007 he won the Golden Lighthouse in the 24th Biennale of Alexandria, Egypt.

He is the author of copious journal papers and two book chapters and he has been invited to more than twenty international art and science exhibitions and conferences.

Among Michaloudis' many other achievements is that two of his silica aerogel artworks were chosen to be part of Carnegie Mellon’s University MoonArk project that they will be rocketed to the Moon and exist there for billions of years.