The Fashion Gangs

Clothing design is often perceived as the work of a solitary and singular talent, of an outsider looking in. But as Balmain’s Olivier Rousteing, Maria Cornejo, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele and Telfar Clemens prove, making clothes is in fact the ultimate act of collaboration. Introduction by Alice Newell-Hanson

- Alice Newell-Hanson

Maria Cornejo and Co.

By Kate Guadagnino Photograph by Olivia Arthur

ONE MIGHT THINK Maria Cornejo’s clothes enthrall creative women because she herself thinks like an artist. When the designer launched her label, Zero + Maria Cornejo, in New York in 1998, it was with a distinctive vocabulary of geometric shapes: near-seamless asymmetrical dresses and separates that flirt with the avant-garde. But her followers are less likely to talk of form or abstraction than about how Cornejo’s clothes make them feel — namely, like themselves. “She leaves room for you to make them your own,” says Camilla Nickerson, Vogue’s style director and an old friend of Cornejo’s (the pair became close through their sons and often holiday together, most recently to Costa Rica). Another pal, Teresita Fernández, a New York-based installation artist who was wearing Cornejo’s designs well before her gallerist introduced the two of them 12 years ago, feels “her clothes are for women who are creating something beyond their own appearance.”