How do you know you’ve made it as a brand? Internet virality, yes. Great sales, yes. But the peak surely has to be having a legion of celebrity fans.
“I think our proudest moment is probably a year and a half ago, when Madonna messaged our Instagram directly,” Laura Villasenin tells me. The reason? She wanted to wear a pair of Aline boots from Villasenin’s fashion label Miista.
“To receive a message from somebody directly, that you really admire, it was just one of those moments that you go, what is this?” she laughs. “It cannot be real.”
Understandable, but if any brand has earned its stripes as the ‘cool girl’ choice, Miista is it. If the name rings a bell, that might be because it’s currently everywhere: from our Instagram feeds, where it’s been gracing the feet of trendsetters since 2011, when the brand was founded, to the sample sales that helped it go viral.
The Miista style is instantly recognisable: square toes, rectangular heels, exposed seams and inverted wedges. It broke through with its quirky-yet-practical loafers and boots, but these days, you’re just as likely to find twists on trending styles like football boots on its site. Celebs like Charli xcx, fka twigs and Rosalia are fans – Charli wore the brand’s Finola boots on her Brat summer tour – as are Bella Hadid and Sophie Turner. Villasenin tells me that the brand’s typical customer is the “well-dressed weird one.”
In the last few years, Miista has also blossomed financially, with stores opening up everywhere from New York to Paris. However, the brand’s roots remain firmly entrenched in London. These days, Villasenin is a busy woman: she’s still based in the capital, though constantly travelling, and we chat over Zoom ahead of a busy day in Paris.
For her, the journey started in 2001, when the Galician-born Villasenin moved to the UK to study at the London College of Fashion. She ended up becoming interested in shoe design – and in creating a brand that, as she puts it, combines high quality “craft made in Europe” with an experimental ethos and a price point that is accessible “if you save a little bit.”
She set about doing just that, designing the shoes herself and laying the groundwork for a supply chain that would eventually go on to encompass a factory in Spain and Portugal, as well as training craftsmen to make the brand’s high-quality garments. These days, everything is still designed and created in Europe, which also helps explain the high price points: shoes start at £160 and go up to £500.
The name Miista was born out of an evening having a “couple of beers in a pub in London Fields with a couple of friends of mine”, while the brand’s identity has been shaped by the capital from the start. “Initially the music industry is what made me move to London: that essence of music, culture, the underground scene,” she says. “It definitely had a very strong influence [on the brand]… London is a cultural melting pot.”
London’s reputation as an international city also meant that Miista was keen to establish itself as an outward-looking outfit almost from the start, building a presence first in the capital, then in Barcelona, where they opened their first store in 2017, as well as Paris and New York in 2024.
Then, of course, are the famous sample sales – which is how I first heard about the brand – where Miista sells off their experimental shoe designs and surplus stock at prices that a 25-year-old me was very excited by. These don’t just happen in cities the brand has a store in: they’ve taken place in Milan, Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Sydney among others.
“It's a tiny, tiny fraction of our business,” Villasenin stresses. “We actually use them as a means of discovery, and a way of making sure that nothing goes to waste… it’s a way to meet people physically, really.”
But the sample sales did their job, as did the company’s smart tactic of moving onto Instagram at a time when the platform was exploding in usership. Between 2023 and 2025, they grew at a 45 to 50 per cent monthly rate – a huge leap, which hasn’t stopped since.
So, what makes something quintessentially Miista? “It's definitely the way we experiment with volume and materials,” she says. “We play a lot with opposites. But then sometimes you see funny quotes around us, like, ‘These are the guys that make ugly shoes for cool girls.’
“Maybe it's a bit ugly, but when you see it on the street, you [really] see a difference. You see the detail, you see the craftsmanship, and you see we put a lot of attention on unexpected details and design.”
These days, it’s not just shoes Villasenin is working on. As Miista grew, she found herself feeling “a little bored” by the restrictions of only working with footwear. As she puts it, “by dressing the Miista woman as a whole, we would be able to tell a much stronger story and learn a lot more” – the brand branched out into ready-to-wear fashion in 2021. Think ruched silk tops, skirts held together with safety pins and belts that also double as bras, mostly in shades of cool-girl black.
With Miista riding new highs, what’s next for the brand? A slot at fashion week, perhaps?
“Fashion Week is definitely something we've been thinking about,” Villasenin says. There’s also the opening of stores in Berlin and LA, a new Spanish factory opening in September and “a beautiful project coming in in London that is not a catwalk, but really is a performance.”
“I shouldn't be saying a lot more, but it will be a big thing,” she says. With her at the helm, it’ll doubtless be worth watching.
