The survivor

Losing the fear

At first, September 11 seemed like the worst thing that could happen, but it turned out to be just the beginning.

“There were a lot of difficult moments,” Ms. Woroniecka said. “It was clearly 2008. Barneys went bankrupt – that was 25 percent of our wholesale sales. Covid was a big one.”

It wasn’t just Covid, either: Just before the pandemic, she and Mr. Borthwick, who had photographed all the Zero collections and worked from their brownstone, split after more than thirty years together. Then Ms Cornejo moved at short notice, got Covid and then was diagnosed with breast cancer. (It was caught early and she is now cancer-free.) “Things happen all the time,” she said, “but this time all the things happened at once.”

When the pandemic hit, she said, “I thought, OK, we’re going out of business.” Then she got the virus herself. “I was on my own,” she said. “New York was really scary, and you could hear the ambulances day and night.” She decided to stay home and take care of herself. “I’d rather be in my own bed than somewhere where people are panicking,” she said. “It was very liberating to lose that fear.”

Despite all this, she had her job. “When I was going through my divorce, the only thing that kept me from falling apart was my work,” she said. “I look at myself in the mirror now and sometimes I don’t even recognize myself, but in my work I know who I am.”

(She and Mr. Borthwick recently collaborated for the first time since the divorce on her 25th anniversary book, which features her fan group as models—her son, Joey; Chloë Sevigny; Brooke Williams of the Resistance Revival Chorus; the 74-year-old photographer Francesca Sorrenti.)