Jon Kortajarena was eighteen and on a trip to Barcelona in 2003 when a booker spotted him at a fashion show, and within a year he had fronted Just Cavalli’s spring 2004 campaign for Roberto Cavalli. The face the industry had found, the cheekbones and dark brow and the Basque seriousness over a six-foot-two frame, went straight into the heart of fashion.

In 2007, Jon fronted the first Tom Ford menswear campaign, and Ford kept returning to him across the years that followed. L’Officiel Hommes devoted its spring-summer 2008 issue to him across 200 pages, the first time a male model had been given the magazine on those terms.

His acting career began in 2009 with Tom Ford’s directorial debut A Single Man, and he has spent the years since developing it across Spanish-language television and English-language film, including Quantico, Heart of Stone, the Movistar+ crime drama El Inmortal, and the Netflix series Machos Alfa.

Jon has stayed inside the industry’s top tier the whole time, with campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana, Karl Lagerfeld, Valentino, Chanel, and Hugo Boss, and an ongoing Bulgari ambassadorship for the watch collections.

He is one of a small group of male models of his generation to have stayed visible across this many seasons, and the only one running a Spanish film career alongside it.