Maria Cornejo: Zero

Description

The first and long-awaited diaristic volume of the celebrated fashion designer Maria Cornejo - the queen of feminine, timeless, artful minimalism. Maria Cornejo established her atelier in 1998, and in the nineteen years since her label has grown a devoted following of fashion icons including First Lady Michelle Obama. A champion of women in the fashion industry and beyond, Cornejo is guided by the idea of creating wearable luxury for real women. Her designs are timeless and accessible, using only the highest-quality fabrics to make minimalist, modern, understated luxury and effortless elegance. This is an intimate portrait of Cornejo's processes and inspirations that combines a mix of Polaroids, sketches, runway shots, and photographs created especially for this book by her fashion-photographer husband, Mark Borthwick, including images of Tilda Swinton, Cindy Sherman, and many other fashion muses. This much-anticipated volume will be a must-have for lovers of fashion, culture, and personal style alike.

Maria Cornejo was born in Chile and moved to England with her family when she was a child. Her varied career spans London, Paris, Milan and Tokyo where she was part of the ground-breaking design partnership Richmond Cornejo; developed her own signature "Maria Cornejo" collection; and worked as a creative consultant for major retailers such as Joseph, Tehen and Jigsaw. In 1996, Cornejo and her family moved to New York where, in 1998, she transformed a raw space in Nolita into a highly creative atelier and store known as Zero. Having been a finalist for the Fashion Prize of the 2005 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards, Maria Cornejo was honored as the winner of the award in 2006. Cornejo has proudly been a member of the CFDA since 2003. Cornejo currently lives with her husband, the photographer Mark Borthwick, and their two children in Brooklyn, New York and continues to design from her Bleecker Street atelier.

"In other news, the designer has a book coming out in October, a retrospective with Rizzoli spanning her 20 years of work. "I focus a lot on the early years, which is not documented that much anywhere," she said. "Also because the early years informed my design process and that's not online, so it felt important to have that set in stone somewhere." -The Hollywood Reporter "A beautiful retrospective on the Chilean designer, who has dressed such fashion VIPs as former First Lady Michelle Obama and Tilda Swinton" -In Style "If you want to really want to know what the book is about then you must be interested in knowing this designer's fundamentals: "'Let the fabric dictate the drape, let the fabric dictate the shape, no shoulder seam, no side seams, no darts, no collars, seam displacement, off kilter, straight line against curve, line displacement and no buttons.' " -New York Journal of Books "The tome, which features photography by Cornejo's husband, Mark Borthwick, has a sketch-and-scrapbook feel: Myriad drawings-some as basic as shapes overwritten with the words tube, circle, and triangle-are printed next to images of two decades' worth of Cornejo's cerebrally pragmatic clothes. " -Vogue.com