Designer stages alternative fashion show featuring ‘real women’

Designer Míriam Ponsa hosted her own solo show at the Antiga Fàbrica Damm on Tuesday – Muses – featuring “real women” after years of presenting her creations at the annual 080 Barcelona Fashion event.

Intended as an alternative to 080’s more traditional aesthetic canons, Ponsa’s new collection’s target audience are no longer the young and skinny who are typically valued at mainstream fashion shows, but average everyday women of all shapes and sizes.

Striving for diversity, Ponsa deliberately chose women between the ages of 16 and 64 to model her clothing, which she says was inspired by important women including Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo, Mother Theresa or Malala Yousafzai.

Her usual black and white combinations dominated her pieces, as well as earthy tonalities, and Ponsa was quick to stress that anyone could wear her clothing: “It doesn’t matter if you’re 62 or not.”

As for why she chose to step away from 080, she says her decision coincided with the rise of feminism and equality-seeking movements.

Ponsa described her choice to use non-professional models that are closer to her desired end clients as one that “came quite naturally” to her despite never having done so before, but she soon realized just how out of the ordinary this choice was: “Maybe we should normalize this – it would be good for this to be normal.”