Zara's founder built a fashion empire yet refuses to wear its clothes
Amancio Ortega, who started Zara, turns up in a plain blue blazer, white shirt and grey trousers, and none of them come from his own shops. He declines to wear a tie, has spoken to just three journalists, and no photograph of him appeared in print until 1999. Yet he pioneered fast fashion.
Ortega was born on 28 March 1936 in a village in León, the youngest of four children, and grew up partly in the Basque Country. At 14 he left school when his father, a railway worker, was posted to A Coruña in Galicia. There he got a job as a shop hand at a local shirtmaker, Gala, and learned to make garments by hand. The shop still stands on the same downtown corner.
In 1963 he set up his own firm making quilted bathrobes, and in 1975 he and his wife, Rosalía Mera, opened the first Zara. From that one store grew Inditex, whose chains include Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear and Zara Home. By 2009 the group ran over 6,000 shops, employed more than 92,000 people and was nearly 60 percent owned by Ortega. It floated on the stock market in 2001, and he stepped back from running it a decade later.
The fortune followed the share price. For a spell in 2015, when Inditex stock peaked, he briefly overtook Bill Gates as the world's richest man at around 80 billion dollars. By 2026 he was worth an estimated 147 billion, second in Europe only to Bernard Arnault. Much of that now sits in property through his company Pontegadea, from Madrid's Torre Picasso to buildings in Manhattan, Chicago and Seattle.
His foundation's largest gift, 320 million euros announced in March 2017 on his 81st birthday, bought cancer detection and treatment equipment for Spanish public hospitals, though some political parties criticised it. Despite it all, he mostly lives in an apartment in A Coruña, the city where he first learned to sew.
Source: Amancio Ortega
