What it takes to create a Zara pose

About a decade and a half ago, when Zara first launched in India, I did what any fashion-loving millennial would: I took the day off from work and queued up at the doors of this high-street behemoth on opening day. Zara has since become both noun and verb. Tore your shirt at work? Just Zara one. Can’t be bothered to stitch a last-minute blouse for a sari? Zara has a cropped top that will do. Even Meghan Markle paired her Loro Piana sweater with Zara linen trousers, to the shock of BFF Mindy Kaling on her Netflix show With Love, Meghan.

The high-street brand has expanded its reach to over 97 physical markets around the world, not counting its e-commerce reach. In India, there are 23 stores already.

From the time the brand first opened their doors here, India’s buying power, fashion literacy, and exposure to international brands have evolved. The fact that it has managed to hold on to the unique space it holds in all these years aside, the one thing that tickles me most as a stylist is its deeply unserious, unintentionally genius, tongue-firmly-in-cheek campaign photography, and, by extension, their visual grammar.

There’s an entire Instagram account, @awkwardzara, dedicated to decoding this visual impishness. Think: a bikini worn over a wool vest, captioned ‘When you’re the only kid at the party with conservative parents’. Or the wildly popular ‘Pose Like a Zara Model’ TikTok challenge, where users contorted themselves into meta-mannequins.

At some point, the weirdness became the signature. And now, 50 years into Zara’s existence, it feels entirely deliberate. This spring, I made a pilgrimage to the Inditex headquarters in A Coruña, Spain (where, in 1975, Zara opened its first store), to understand what goes on behind the meme machine’s curtain. What I found was a brand just as obsessed with its visual grammar as the internet is, replete with pilot stores and a multi-storey studio set-up.

The Inditex headquarters stretch across several football fields’ worth of whitewashed calm and quiet choreography. High-tech robots deliver goods between teams. Teams of seamstresses and designers huddle around toiles and patterns, testing silhouettes before greenlighting new styles.

Zara shoots a mind-boggling number of editorial campaigns every season, all in-house. Studio bays are lined up like chic factory stations, each rotating its set—a girl in a trench, another in a tulle skirt lying across a table, a third levitating. No more than four people are spotted per bay to keep the shots fast-paced and perhaps even secretive. It’s quick, precise, and eerily quiet. Think monastery, but with better shoes and jewellery.

Over email after the tour, the brand told me that they are constantly looking to “upend e-commerce with high-fashion editorial content that offers all our consumers the originality and inspiration they crave”.

As any fashion junkie will know, this obsession with creating a fashion-forward look wasn’t a happy accident. Mid-lockdown, Zara had a spring/summer 2020 campaign to launch amid social-distancing rules. What did they do? They sent the clothes to models like Malgosia Bela, Anja Rubik, and Jill Kortleve and said: Your move. The result? A formal debut of something a few sharp eyes had already spotted: a distinct, almost sculptural body language in Zara’s campaigns.

When location shoots and big productions were out of the question, Zara leaned into what its talent could do with a pose. Soon, the meme-makers were in, screenshotting and reposting the brand’s balletic stances and acrobatic body language experiments.

Over the years, they’ve invested in their visual strategy by collaborating with mega models like Gisele Bündchen, Adut Akech, and Paloma Elsesser. Photographers like Steven Meisel and Mario Sorrenti and directors like Fabian Baron made it all look impossibly expensive. Just recall the brand’s most iconic visuals: the spare, simple portraits of Kate Moss that made up the fall/winter 2003 campaign; the elegant Yves Saint Laurent-esque divas from fall/winter 2018; the powerful fall/winter 2020 tailoring line that was shot by Meisel in black and white; or the video series it launched in September 2023 and again earlier this year with supermodel mom and daughter duo Cindy Crawford and Kaia Gerber. Even their website layouts continue the theme. Bloomberg Business reported that it was more like “a glossy fashion magazine than an online retailer, making finding and selecting products a bewildering maze”.

The same kind of decision-making is happening when it comes to design too. Rather than anoint one creative director, as GAP did recently with Zac Posen or Uniqlo with Claire Waight Keller, Zara keeps a revolving door of sharp, left-of-centre design collaborators: Stefano Pilati, Samuel Ross of A-Cold-Wall, Nanushka, Harry Lambert. (This is apart from the 350 in-house designers, with the staff coming from 40 countries, according to the BBC.) The clothes may be priced for the masses, but the pictures are pitched to the front row only.

A similar kind of thoughtful approach to visual language extends further into the Zara universe. This begins with Zara’s pilot stores, fully functional mock-ups of actual Zara locations, used to test everything from visual merchandising to customer flow. Imagine retail meets R&D with a touch of theatre.

Should the puffer jackets be on the left or the right? Does an extra mirror near the trial room increase basket value? Everything is put to the test here before it’s made global. Visual merchandisers from across the world, including India, send photos of their in-store layouts to the Spanish mothership for feedback.

This focus on perfecting visuals perhaps comes from the fact that Marta Ortega, Inditex’s current chairwoman and daughter of Amancio Ortega, the founder of the group, is a passionate art collector. The Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation hosts a photography retrospective every year in A Coruña. So naturally, when it came to choosing a photographer for the brand’s most recent 50th anniversary campaign, she was thinking of someone legendary: Steven Meisel. Ortega said, “Creativity is the heart of Zara—it is the characteristic that defines us. This incredible film by Steven Meisel is an expression of creative freedom, and the magic we always want to create.” Featuring 50 of fashion’s most iconic faces—everyone from Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford to Imaan Hammam and Naomi Campbell—and with makeup by Pat McGrath and hair by Guido Palau, it was a wink to the legacy and the prowess of this retail giant.

At the Inditex offices, a life-size rapidly changing numbers board constantly indicates what pieces are doing well, in which regions, helping the conglomerate make design decisions and changes in real times. This urgency carries forward in their shoots. Its visual language, whether banana-shaped poses or lookbooks that feel like art school inside jokes, has become a dialect all its own. You may not always understand it. But you can’t stop looking. And isn’t that the point?