Pants, not dresses, are Maria Cornejo’s best selling category these days. That’s a fairly significant shift for Cornejo, a designer whose curving seams and collapsing volumes make for dress shapes as flattering as they are easy to wear. It comes down at least in part to the pandemic, which accelerated the casualization of the culture; women simply have fewer occasions for dresses.
Cornejo understands the difference between need and desire, so she’s still showing plenty of dresses for next fall. They come in fabrics ranging from luscious Japanese polyester draped with the ease of a beach sarong to a metallic shot jacquard that loosely conjures the Renaissance with a peekaboo bodice below a high buttoning neck. She lets her fabrics guide her. But where the collection feels most expressive is in its explorations of the more casual side of her repertoire. Speaking of pants, Cornejo’s customers will be spoiled for choice. There are cool cropped and flared cuts in techy recycled taffeta and a new Terra Denim, which is made in part from post-consumer recycled cotton.
Focused, as ever, on choosing responsibly sourced materials and designing sustainably, many of the pieces that she pairs with those pants are two-in-ones, including faux fur shrugs and denim wrap jackets cut like karate gis that reverse to that techy taffeta. Another innovation: cotton sweatshirting made from post-industrial textile waste that’s been treated with a proprietary coating that gives the material a more substantial outerwear feel. She used it for a jacket with a cocooning volume. Some designers are hemmed in by the constraints of creating in an environmentally conscious way. Not Cornejo; her ingenuity keeps her vital.
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
