The designer Maria Cornejo will proudly admit that one of her most iconic pieces, the chic navy wrap dress that was famously photographed on Chloe Sevigny for the Paris-based indie fashion magazine Purple in 1999, is mass-produced garbage—well, it was an art project as well. “That was a blanket from K-Mart,” Cornejo said of the repurposed swath of fabric. “It never went into production. It’s falling apart now, disintegrating.”
What began as a creative lark was inadvertently savvy. “We ended up getting a lot of clients because of it,” Cornejo said. “This store in L.A. called out of the blue and wanted to have the entire collection. There was no strategic plan. Everything happened very organically, and in a weird way, because I didn’t want to be a fashion designer.” Cornejo then summed up her very ’90s ethos: “The more you said no, the more people wanted you.”
The designer in her atelier. Courtesy of Zero + Maria Cornejo.
It is a much different fashion landscape now. Despite all odds, Zero + Maria Cornejo has outlasted the big-box behemoth K-Mart’s New York City outposts and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. To honor the occasion, Cornejo’s fall collection consists of limited editions of some of her greatest under-the-radar hits.
The blanket dress (now christened the One Chloe and made in silk charmeuse) will be available for the first time. Many Sunday gallery crawl mainstays have been updated, such as the 1998 Triangle top and the 2011 Koya coat, which was displayed at the Met’s “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.” The anniversary collection goes on sale next month.
Cornejo’s ex-husband and frequent collaborator, the art photographer Mark Borthwick, shot Sevigny for that original Purple shoot. He reprised the role this year, photographing Sevigny again in the updated