The first deafblind model in the world, the first person with a cochlear implant in the Balearic Islands, the first to launch an inclusive project for those affected by Usher syndrome… Mireia Mendoza (Palma, 1993), made her big debut: setting foot on the Milan Fashion Week of 2019. It was for the firm Esh by Esh and she paraded with the support cane and guided by another mannequin.
“It was a beautiful experience, I felt enormous pride and inexplicable empowerment. I felt like, ‘Wow, I’m deafblind but here I am. A feeling of great acceptance too. The light dazzled me a lot and it was not easy to walk after the guide but the summary is that I felt comfortable. I think the attendees must have been amazed: the one in Milan was the first time that a person with a red and white cane paraded to make deafblindness visible”.
Now, the Spanish public will be able to see it in the Inclusion Tour, an integrating parade whose models are people with functional diversity and that will begin in Córdoba on April 1 to later tour other locations in the country. The firefighters of the Andalusian city will also climb this catwalk promoted by Enrique Villena and Enma Torres, creators of the Ibiza Inclusion Fashion Day. Its collection will benefit the Córdoba Inclusive platform, COCEMFE.
Mireia was born profoundly deaf and at the age of four received a clucking implant. Thanks to that breakthrough she was able to start to hear something. She attended college, visited speech therapists, and tried to find her way out into the world. Then she developed retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that has been turning off the light. “My degree of vision is very reduced, barely 10% and in a tubular way. At night I don’t see anything at all, I use a cane. Combined with deafness, they make up Usher syndrome. As a child, she was only deaf. Over time I had to reinvent myself and try even harder”. She is aware that in a few years she will lose even that meager 10% and she will definitely stop seeing. “I am preparing because I have assumed it. I will have to learn other communication systems such as Braille or fingerprints so as not to lose the information that surrounds me.”
Since she was a child, she was interested in fashion and dreamed of one day being the protagonist of the editorials she saw in magazines. She has worked as a supermarket cashier, a clerk in a clothing store and today she sells ONCE coupons. But she achieved her dream. And she self-taught. Mireia has launched. MM Deafblind Model: “This is a personal project that seeks to raise awareness about deafblindness. I have worked hard to gain access to fashion and I want to make it more inclusive, so that society realizes that people with different abilities are strong and valuable: in addition to parades or photographic sessions, I give informative talks in schools, institutes, centers of training, etc.
Mireia, who gives this interview via videoconference with the help of a sign language interpreter, poses in her WhatsApp avatar photo with an attractive young man. “Yes, he is my boyfriend. And he is deafblind, like me. We began to speak in sign language, first in the international and then in the Italian version. It is that he lives in Italy ”, clarifies the model. They love each other like other human beings but somehow more intensely: the skin-to-skin contact they feel is deeper than the rest of us can dream.
