FASHION
The man who made it all possible
Amancio Ortega, the visionary behind Inditext and its flagship brand Zara, is one of those rare individuals. You won’t find him courting headlines or social media trends. But his influence touches millions of closets around the world.
Born in 1936 in the small town of Busdongo de Arbás in northern Spain, Ortega's story begins far from the glamour of high fashion. He left school at 14 to work as a delivery boy for a shirtmaker. It was there, in the humble tailoring shops of La Coruña, that he learned the business from the inside out: fabrics, patterns, customers, margins. But more importantly, he learned something deeper—how to listen. To people, to change, to need.
In 1975, alongside his then-wife Rosalía Mera, Ortega opened the first Zara store. It wasn't luxurious. It wasn’t even centrally located. But it offered something radical: fashion that was both stylish and accessible. Ortega wasn’t interested in following trends—he wanted to anticipate them. More than that, he wanted to shorten the distance between runway and real life. While the rest of the industry worked in seasonal cycles, Ortega built a system that could design, produce, and stock a new item in just a few weeks. That was the beginning of what the world would later call fast fashion.
