“We’re pretty demanding,” Ortega Pérez (wearing Zara in the gardens outside her home in northwestern Spain) says of her extended clan, many of whom work for the company today. Sittings Editor: Karl Templer.Photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Vogue, September 2026.
In an industrial zone in Arteixo, at the furthest northwestern tip of Spain, amid granite quarries and aluminum merchants, Inditex, the company that owns Zara, has built a city of glass. Within it there are offices, factories, warehouses, photography studios, design departments, ateliers, a logistics center, showrooms complete with artful storefronts—all designed to fulfill desires at lightning speed.
On a top floor, the online team runs at least two fashion shoots at a time, ready to drop new products twice a week. Across a walkway in the sky, banks of sewing machines are operated by 100 seamstresses in a room the size of a small airport. On the third floor of a new building dedicated to Zara’s commercial operations, a vast screen connects to shopping tills in 1,495 stores worldwide and shows what is—or isn’t—selling, so the in-house designers can quickly adapt. As this detailed information filters through to the people who decide how to give the customers what they want, robots mow the expansive lawns and young forests grow. There are restaurants, of course, as well as bicycles and motorized scooters—although, if you’re the boss overseeing the company’s 163,000 employees and you need to get to another building in a hurry, sometimes it’s quicker to take a car.
Aside from Marta herself, a few persuasive factors recur in conversation with Zara’s collaborators. First, the family feeling appears to be contagious. “There’s something about the conviviality of that particular company,” says the photographer David Sims, who has worked for Zara for 15 years. “It’s really relaxed and a lot of fun.” Second, creative people are supported in doing what they want. As Marta’s friend Linda Evangelista puts it, “This is what I love about Marta: She lets the artist shine. She hires people for who they are, and her admiration is genuine.” And—not least—seemingly every fashion insider who has visited the Inditex headquarters at Arteixo has been stunned by its systems.
When the Zara team got together with Bad Bunny to discuss a multipart collaboration, Marta explains, they shared a language and a sense of the importance of family. But it was the company’s innovative infrastructure that allowed them to throw in the Super Bowl Halftime Show. As Marta’s husband, Carlos Torretta Echevarría, who, as Zara’s head of communications, was involved in the discussions, points out: Who else could make clothing for 700 dancers in two weeks?
Galliano, whose first collection for Zara will hit stores in late September, first came to Arteixo when Marta invited him to give a talk to Inditex staff. “I was quite blown away,” he tells me. “It was like a James Bond setup, really, how stuff could be moved around the world. I was like, ‘Wow—I’ve worked in ready-to-wear, darling, but this: This is incredible!’ ”
In a private room at Inditex HQ—I’ve lost track by now of which building we’re in—Marta and I are served lunch. Everything is discreetly delivered: the opening salad, the filet steak, the chocolate dessert molded into a cacao pod. The room is filled with the comforting smell of Zara Home’s Basilicum candles. The aura is luxurious. And yet, Marta makes clear as we eat together, “we’re a long way from wanting to be a luxury brand. Luxury does an incredible job and inspires us all a lot, but we don’t want to change what Zara is. We want to produce a well-made product that reaches the maximum number of people.”
After the brand celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, they moved on quickly. “We’re not great celebrators here,” Marta says with an ironic smile. “Yes, those 50 years deserved to be honored, but the past is more important as a reminder of our mistakes—it’s better not to repeat them than to celebrate our successes.”
If this sounds tough, it’s in keeping with the Ortega family’s exacting nature. (“We’re very demanding,” Marta says of her entire clan.) Karl Templer, a Zara creative director, tells me that, because of the company’s work ethic—Marta’s in particular—“you want to do a really good job for her. She inspires people to bring something to the table.”
Over the months that I’ve observed Marta, I’ve wondered how best to convey her particular mix of warmth and cool. There’s no question that she is, as people who know her well have said to me in Spanish, cercana. The word literally means “close” and loosely translates, in this case, as a gift for friendship. Marta is a noticer—of how you feel, of what you like, of whether you might need anything. If anyone at work is ill, they’ll get a message from Marta. If she invites you to dinner, your whole family is welcome. If you’re her friend, she’ll never miss a birthday. After she bonded with Galliano over their love of Ernest Hemingway, Galliano was astounded to soon receive a signed first edition of A Farewell to Arms, with the pages still uncut. When Inditex’s CEO, Óscar García Maceiras, told me that attention to detail was one of Marta’s strengths, I expected him to mean the design of a sleeve or the buckle on a bag; the example he gave instead was this: He had told Marta of an employee working at a Zara store in a faraway country who wanted to be closer to their family in Spain. Marta immediately got in touch and found the employee a job nearby. “I’ll tell you something,” Evangelista says, “she’s a real woman’s woman. Very supportive, very family-oriented.”
Yet Marta also has the low-key allure of someone not entirely easy to impress. She is “rigorous and mathematical and direct,” in Pieter Mulier’s expression—something he finds rare in the fashion world. “She has a very clear opinion, and you get it in a second.” She can be laconic. Her dark, expressive eyebrows and the deep timbre of her voice stand in entertaining contrast to the bounding energy of her husband, who is urgently sociable.
Pierpaolo Piccioli understood these different sides to her. Marta had been his client for two years when he designed four Valentino couture outfits for her wedding in 2018. He imagined three sleek, understated looks, and then had another idea: a romantic pink moiré strapless gown with an exaggerated bow. He suggested she wear it with combat boots. “It’s not me,” Marta said instantly. Five minutes later, she texted back: “You’re right.” She danced in it until three in the morning.
Zara’s life began when Amancio Ortega and his first wife, the late Rosalía Mera, decided to start making quilted bathrobes and lingerie in their living room. The lingerie, which was considered somewhat risqué, met a need in the Spanish consumer that was beginning to be admissible as the Franco regime came to an end. The first Zara store opened in the couple’s hometown of La Coruña, and the company expanded across Spain and Portugal over the next decade. In 1989 they opened a shop in New York, giving rise to the phrase “fast fashion” when the The New York Times reported that Zara catered to customers who “change their clothes as often as they change the color of their lipstick.”
Into this world was born a girl who noticed everything. Those who knew Marta as a child recall her large, watchful eyes and attest to her being as observant then as she is now. The only child of Ortega and his second wife, Flora Pérez, Marta spent a lot of time with her maternal grandmother while her parents were working at Zara. “My grandmother is probably the person who’s had the greatest impact on me,” Marta reflects. “She brought up eight children. She never cared where anyone was from or what they did for a living—the only things that mattered to her were whether people were hardworking and honest.”
While her grandmother helped her make clothes for her dolls, it was a British nanny who first took Marta horseback riding in La Coruña. By the age of 10, she was hooked.
“I competed as a show jumper for many years,” she says—and while she didn’t jump professionally, it became a big part of her life. When she went to business school in London, she competed on weekends, and when she started working on the Zara shop floor on the King’s Road, she did the same. After she had her eldest son, Amancio, with her first husband, the Olympic show jumper Sergio Álvarez Moya, she returned to competition but increasingly found that she wanted to spend her weekends with her son. “Now I have less time and more children,” she says succinctly. “When my daughter was born, I stopped—to compete at that level, you need to train every day, and I wasn’t doing that.”
Marta retains the drive of an athlete—with some unusual specifics. She describes show jumping as “a thankless sport,” simply because “most of the time, you lose.” What it taught her was not only a lesson in humility but a sensitivity to others that has clearly been useful for her life in business. “The most special thing about it is that you’re there with a living being,” she explains. “Any athlete has to be fit, but in this case both you and the horse have to be in good shape. It’s not a racket or a football—it’s alive, and it depends on you.”
Now Marta shares competition horses in Holland with the son of her original trainer, and she has a riding school in La Coruña that, among other things, offers therapy for children with disabilities. “I like not having lost touch with that world,” she says. “It gave me so much for so long.”
Marta met Carlos Torretta Echevarría in January 2016 through a mutual friend. They all had dinner at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village—Carlos was working at a branch of the Elite modeling agency and had lived in New York for almost a decade. By April they were dating, and at the end of that year he moved back to his native Spain. They married in La Coruña two years later, and after a while Carlos—whom Marta says is “like a walking encyclopedia”—joined what he describes as “the biggest family business in the world.”
“They’re a fantastic couple to spend time with,” says Mulier, who enjoys summer holidays with them in Greece, eating and talking and waterskiing. “We’re yin and yang,” Carlos says affectionately. “I speak a lot, she speaks less. She’s very organized and I’m more unorganized. You know, I’m sure it drives her crazy a million times a day, but in the end I think it works well. It’s also very good for me,” he adds, “to have someone like her who puts me on the right path.” They still argue about the weather, Marta being fond of Galicia’s British-style climes and Carlos being of a more Mediterranean bent.
Amancio, now 13, was joined by Matilda (6), Manuel (2)—and, most recently, a long-haired Jack Russell puppy. Their home in La Coruña—next door to Marta’s parents’—has a calm atmosphere not unlike the one Zara has sought to create in The Apartment spaces within its stores; their nearby country house has a garden designed by the British landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith. Each weekday Marta gets up at 6:45, goes to the gym (“normal training and some Pilates, nothing very exciting”), has breakfast with the kids, takes them to school, and drives to the office. In the evenings, she prefers reading to watching TV. Current favorite authors include Ottessa Moshfegh and the Moldovan Romanian writer Tatiana Tibuleac. “I love a bookshop,” she says. (She loves a stadium concert just as much, whether it’s Bad Bunny or her friend Rosalía.)
It’s not always easy to follow in your father’s footsteps, especially when he’s forged such a globe-spanning path, but Marta says she doesn’t feel that pressure. “For me, it’s a source of pride. I don’t want to be like my father, because no one ever will be. I feel like I’m in a good moment of life,” she explains: “I do a job I enjoy every day, I work with incredible people every day. To be able to do that in a city where I can be close to my family is an enormous privilege—not just my children but my extended family, who support me a huge amount.”
David Sims’s quadruple-height studio is a converted tram shed in North London, its cream-colored tiles reminiscent of those in old London Underground stations. On the day of the Zara shoot, one of the models, Karolina Spakowski, stands in a black slip dress against a gray infinity wall. The Bee Gees are playing through the speakers, and fans are gently blowing three different kinds of air toward her. Sims is shooting 12 pieces of clothing for The Item, a capsule that drops once a week, with everything overseen by Templer. Marta stands at the back of the studio in brown cargo pants and a knitted yellow top, hugging a leather-bound notebook. Two of her colleagues are beside her.
In November, Sims’s work will form the latest photography exhibition at the Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in La Coruña. Photography, and fashion photography in particular, is something she’s always loved. “In my head, I always thought I’d take photos,” she tells me.
As a teenager, Marta would tag along with her mother to Zara shoots. “There was one in the Guggenheim in Bilbao,” she remembers, “before it opened to the public. It was a Spanish photographer, and the models were Amber Valletta and Carolyn Murphy. I would have been 14 or 15—I went to watch them at work whenever they’d let me.”
Though Marta’s love of fashion was already clear then (she remembers traveling to New York with her mother and buying a pair of gray patent boots from Marc Jacobs), she now buys the kind of clothes that Zara is sometimes accused of emulating. (In 2012, Zara won a lawsuit from Christian Louboutin, allowing them to make red-soled shoes.) When I ask her about intellectual property, Marta offers a graceful response: “Fashion is a shared language,” she says. “How you speak it is what marks the difference between some people and others. I have great respect for what designers do—I’m a client and admirer of many of them.” She names people who have become friends—Mulier, Piccioli, and more. “Phoebe Philo, of course; Sarah Burton is doing incredible work. I’ve always been an absolute fan of Mrs. Prada. Willy Chavarria, Matthieu Blazy, Jonathan Anderson. The designer I’ve always admired the most is John Galliano, and I’m lucky enough to be working with him.”
The respect is mutual. Piccioli describes Marta as “close to the fashion system” and offers a high compliment: She always, he says, spots the pieces of his that are “more for a connoisseur.” “When you wear couture, you have to know why a black dress is couture while an embroidered dress is ready-to-wear,” he explains. “You have to know that couture is about the hidden parts. It’s not about what you show off. She really gets that point.”
Whether fashion is one language or many, Marta is a perfectly placed translator. “Fast fashion, if I can call it that, wasn’t welcomed with open arms initially,” Sims points out. “And that might still be the case. But because Marta is such a charismatic leader, she creates something that could be seen as harmonious with the institutional houses.”
“For sure,” says Piccioli, “she is the future.”
Fast fashion is not a term Marta uses. She prefers flexible. Almost everything Zara makes travels through its distribution centers in La Coruña, which allows them to be agile. “I don’t think the company would be what it is if we hadn’t stayed in La Coruña,” Marta says. Having spawned an industry built on speed, the company’s leaders say they now aim to be at the forefront of resolving some of its repercussions. Marta tells me that Inditex is committed to improving the social and environmental conditions of its workers, and she is keen to lead the charge on sustainability and aim for net-zero emissions by 2040. Hakan Karaosman, an expert on social sustainability in fashion supply chains, points out that, while Inditex is currently stronger on its water footprint than it is on social issues, it is “really innovative with supply chain design, because they established nearshoring.”
“Our business is very demand-oriented,” Marta says. “The key is to keep stock levels very low and leftovers to a minimum. There are less than 1 percent unsold products—we don’t do big shipments that don’t work and that we have to store in a warehouse. Even if others want to define it as fast fashion, our business model itself may be the most sustainable thing we have.” In 2022 the company launched Zara Pre-owned, a considered platform that makes it easy for you to repair, resell, or donate your Zara clothes.
Galliano, who calls his two-year project for Zara a “reauthoring” of garments from its archive, admits that his initial reaction, when Marta asked if he might work with Zara, was “No way.” His reservations were probably “the same as everyone’s,” he guesses, based on “ill-formed or secondhand news.” By the time he’d done the tour of Inditex and seen the gallery of sustainable fabrics, he’d changed his view. “There’s a couple of fabrics that every couturier uses—silk chiffon, organza. They said, ‘Oh no, you can’t use that—they’re highly flammable. Now, you can use this one.’ They’re so on it.”
Marta opened her foundation by accident. “Peter Lindbergh was our wedding photographer and a personal friend,” she says. “He had curated an exhibition to be shown in Düsseldorf, and he never got to see it. [Lindbergh died in 2019.] When I saw that they were due to open the show there, I spoke to his son Ben and said that I’d love to do an exhibition of Peter’s work in La Coruña. It was all for Peter.”
She found a cement silo in La Coruña’s port that had been empty for 20 years and commissioned a local architect, Elsa Urquijo, to transform it. Now it houses an elegant fountain looking out to the sea, a sequence of monumental exhibition spaces, and an extraordinary spiral-shaped bookshop. The foundation produces a catalog under the MOP imprint for every exhibition—the day I went it was Annie Leibovitz; that was followed by Paolo Roversi—they host talks and book signings, and they give scholarships to four Galician photography students every year to enable them to study abroad.
In this way, Marta, ever proud of the city and the region where she grew up, has made La Coruña and Galicia something of a destination. But what strikes me most is how personal all of this is to her: fashion, photography, family, friends. She tells me about a day she spent in Paris with Lindbergh and the Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz, both now departed. “I have a photo of that day that I think of with a lot of affection,” she says.
“We always talk about fashion as if it were something frivolous, but I think it’s very human,” Marta suggests. “Fashion is present in the lives of millions of people every day. It’s how we present ourselves to the world. It sustains a lot of creativity and requires a lot of sensitivity. And it can be wonderful if we do it well.”
In this story: hair, Damien Boissinot; makeup, Lucia Pica.
Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard.
