http://www.cubico.com/feeds/fashion.xml2007-07-16T15:14:25ZCUBICO Media5Veronica Mendoza

Chilean-born Maria Cornejo has been known to like to dress "brainy women." Her designs like her personality seem to scream strength and independence.

Chilean-born Maria Cornejo has been known to like to dress "brainy women." Her designs like her personality seem to scream strength and independence. She said about her fall 2007 collection, "Sex is overexposed, I want to express sensuality in a subtle way." In an interview with ZOOZOOM online magazine she describes that she likes to design clothes that real women can wear and that she is influenced by contrasts such as incorporating men’s fashion into women’s clothing. "I am always working with the Ying and the Yang," said Cornejo. Since she moved to New York in 1996 and created her own line, Zero, she has been dressing smart and sexy women from throughout the world. Some of her most loyal celebrity clients include Cameron Diaz, Marisa Tomei and Sofia Coppola. Cornejo’s Soho shop in New York also doubles as her studio. You may often see Cornejo at her shop taking personal orders from her celebrity followers. Her line is also sold at stores around the world. Cornejo’s interest in fashion began as a young girl when her grandmother taught her how to knit. She made her first knit dress for a doll at the age of eleven and still keeps the doll along with the dress she made for her. Years later Cornejo is recognized as one of the top fashion designers in the country. She has recently received the honor of being awarded the Fashion Prize of the 2006 Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards. The Award is to honor the best in American design in regards to Architecture, Landscape, Communication, Fashion and more. Cornejo is a leader and an innovator in the field of fashion and can be a role model for Latinas who want to be smart, sexy and bold like her fashion line.4Veronica Mendoza

anolo Blahnik’s shoes can be seen on the feet of rich and famous celebrities such as Madonna, Jennifer Aniston, Winona Ryder and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Manolo Blahnik’s shoes can be seen on the feet of rich and famous celebrities such as Madonna, Jennifer Aniston, Winona Ryder and Sarah Jessica Parker. In fact it was Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, from the hit show "Sex and the City," who made Blahnik’s name famous to beautiful and rich women all over the world. In one episode of "Sex and the City," Bradshaw pleads with a mugger not to steal her shoes. She says, "You can take my Fendi baguette, you can take my ring and my watch, but don’t take my Manolo Blahniks." It is understandable why Bradshaw would ask the mugger not to steal her shoes. A pair of Manolo Blahniks can cost anywhere from $500 to $700. Although his name and shoes have only recently become well known, due to the episode, Blahnik has been making shoes to make women feel sexy since the early 1970s. Blahnik was born in 1942 in the Canary Islands to a Czech father and Spanish mother. It is his Spanish mother who Blahnik credits with introducing him to the world of fashion and shoes. As a child he would read his mother’s fashion magazines and would watch as she designed her own shoes using ribbon and lace. Blahnik was first introduced to the world of shoe making in 1971 when he met with the editor of U.S. Vogue, Diana Vreeland. He met with Vreeland in hopes of becoming a set designer but she enjoyed his sketches of his shoes so much that she encouraged him to be a shoe designer instead. More than 30 years later Blahnik is still making shoes and what is most impressive is that he alone designs every single one of his thousands of shoes. He has no apprentices or assistants and also self produces all of the sketches used to advertise his shoes. It is no wonder that PEOPLE en Español named him one of the"100 Most Influential Hispanics" this year. His shoes have helped thousands of women around the world to feel sexy and elegant for over thirty years.2Stefanie Chase

The moment Kehinde Wiley’s paintbrush meets canvas marks a time when hip hop and art history begin to have something in common.

The moment Kehinde Wiley’s paintbrush meets canvas marks a time when hip hop and art history begin to have something in common. Wiley’s brightly-colored and richly detailed paintings are influenced by 18th and 19th-century portraits, but the artist leaves the stuffiness of those portraits behind and adds his own twist. Wiley trades this frigidness in for something a little more relaxed and a little more representative of people as they are on a daily basis. Even though Wiley is influenced by the portraits from back in the day, he doesn’t want models that are obviously in their best suit and on their best behavior strictly for the sake of being painted. He uses real people—specifically African American people—and, according to what he told Thelma Golden in an interview on KehindeWiley.com, he gets these models from the streets of Detroit, South Central Los Angeles and Brooklyn. The artist started taking an interest in art at a young age. Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Wiley started out taking free art classes at a local university at the age of 11. From there, he continued his art education and attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. According to Wikipedia, this led him to the San Francisco Art Institute for undergraduate school and on to Yale for graduate school. After all of his schooling, Wiley went on as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Wiley shares with Golden that this was the perfect next step after graduating from Yale. "The Studio Museum provided the perfect environment for me to delve into my work without the concerns of professors or academic expectations. There was a big weight lifted—I was free to create without having to think about a day job or a gig. That allowed me to really throw myself into that studio and take risks that I wouldn’t necessarily take," Wiley tells Golden. Harlem seemed to prove to be the best place for finding Wiley’s ideal model. Wiley discovered a whole new culture that he had never been immersed in while living in South Central Los Angeles. "New York is more pedestrian, and there was a vibrancy that I found really interesting. The idea of walking down 125th Street has this runway element to it; there’s a sort of pomp that surrounds it," Wiley adds. So Wiley did what any other determined artist would do and walked up to these people and asked if he could paint their portrait. Wiley tells Golden that he didn’t get the response he was looking for from most of the people, but he came up with a plan that would help his mission: Wiley surrounds himself with a crowd, especially beautiful women, that will attract models and vouch for his credibility at the same time. He considers this sort of "flirtation" a must for his line of work. Once he gets people into his studio, the artist and the model each learn something about the other that builds comfortable conversation and makes the painting process smoother. The selected models see Wiley’s art history books and begin to talk about what they know on the subject. According to KehindeWiley.com, this made Wiley realize that the aspects his models found interesting interested him enough to, in some cases, allow the models to choose the own subject matter of their painting. Because everything in Wiley’s paintings are done up big, he needs models that are strong enough to hold their own on a detail-loaded canvas. According to KehindeWiley.com, some of his paintings feature "contemporary black men pos[ing] as angels, prophets and saints against richly colored swirls of ornate baroque and rococo ornamentation." Along with these, Wiley imitates some of the portraits of military men on horses with some of his models. These models, however, are not in military garb. Fans of 18th-century portraiture find features borrowed from some of Wiley’s influences. According to sfai.edu, his 18th-century influences include Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. Gainsborough has a more obvious influence; with just a glance at his portraits, you can see some of the same techniques used to pose and paint his subjects as Wiley uses. Viewers see less of Constable, whose main subject was landscapes, but Wiley may have borrowed some of his attention to detail. As for what kind of models Wiley considers qualified: "I look for people who possess a certain type of power in the streets. You always look for that alpha male or alpha female character," the artist tells Golden. "But in the end it’s all about chemistry, and there’s this agreement that gets entered into," Wiley finishes. And chemistry, along with talent, seems to be what’s gotten Wiley this far. Chemistry with the models, with the audience and, most importantly, with the canvas. Look for Kehinde Wiley’s second solo show at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio starting this fall.