Meet The Coolest Sustainable Designer Maria Cornejo

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

After thirty years dedicated to making fashion more honest, original and timeless, María Cornejo, the most international Chilean designer, opens the doors of her studio in New York to review and celebrate a career like no other.

Fashion fusion

María Cornejo was born in Chile, raised in Great Britain and has lived and studied in fashion capitals like Paris and New York, where she now resides with her family. The style of her firm, Zero + María Cornejo, is unique, global and unmistakable, and is an inevitable result of this cultural melting pot of which she is proud. “Color is very important to me. It is in the most joyous and fun parts of my collections that my Latin side comes out. I also have a British influence on humor. [Also] I lived in France and hence my chicest, most elegant side of the French. But colors and patterns are always on my Latin side and that is what interests me the most,”he says.

Ahead of its time

Just now we started talking about sustainability and the boom of this trend in the fashion world, but in his study these rules were already applied before fast and slow fashion appeared. “I decided to be sustainable from the beginning after working for large companies and seeing the amount of waste they generated. […] My goal has always been to be able to create something beautiful, rich, highly desirable and at the same time sustainable”, he assures. Among other measures in that line, Cornejo manufactures 84 percent of its collection in New York. "It is very important to know who makes the clothes, that the workers are treated correctly, that they have social resources and that they are well cared for."

Women in power

Cornejo is proud to run a company essentially of women, from the seamstresses who make their clothes in New York, Bolivia and Italy, to their communication team and their stores. She says that for her new collection she has been inspired precisely by the strong and influential women who are changing the world with their work and their voice. “You can see it in the silhouettes and the patterns. For the print, I was inspired by a work by the Chilean artist Gracia Barrios, which is like a map of Latin America made with faces,”he explains.

Human value

All the materials he has used in this collection are natural and organic: linen, denim, biodegradable viscose and organic cotton that they obtain in La Paz, Bolivia, where they collaborate with a women's cooperative that thanks to this work can generate an income to help to keep their families working without leaving home.

Thirty years is nothing

After shaking up the fashion world with his first fashion project in the eighties: Richmond Cornejo, reinventing himself and succeeding with his own brand, opening stores in New York and Los Angeles, receiving the sustainability award from The Fashion Group International, dressing a first lady of the United States and creating a family at the same time, the designer still has a lot to do and celebrate. The future? He acknowledges that he is fascinated by the technological advances that have been launched in the sustainable fashion sector, such as ecological fabrics made from recycled plastics or even mushrooms. "It's amazing, our minds are going to explode with what's to come."