Ana Locking receives the Felicidad Duce Award 2025 during the VII BCN Fashion Symposium
With more than two decades of history, the award has previously recognised figures such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Teresa Helbig and Miren Arzalluz.
Fashion designer and artist Ana Locking received the Felicidad Duce Award 2025 from LCI Barcelona on May 6 during the closing ceremony of the VII BCN Fashion Symposium – THREADING FUTURES. Fashion Design and the Imaginaries of Tomorrow. The award ceremony brought to a close two days dedicated to exploring the future of fashion design and communication, attended by students, lecturers and industry professionals.
The ceremony was chaired by Sílvia Viudas, general director of LCI Barcelona and president of this year’s jury, who opened the event by recalling the history of the award: “For 25 years, we have recognised designers, photographers, journalists and entrepreneurs — people who have devoted their lives to this passionate and creative world, just as Felicidad Duce, the founder of our Fashion School, once did.”
The jury
The Felicidad Duce Award 2025 was deliberated on December 9 at our campus. The jury was made up of Marta Coca, director of 080 Barcelona Fashion; Albasarí Caro, director of Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week; Pepa Bueno, executive director of ACME; Toni Sánchez, director of Moritz Feed Doc; and Estel Vilaseca, head of the Fashion department at LCI Barcelona, who highlighted the award winner’s influence on new generations: “Ana understood from the very beginning the creative, narrative and transformative potential of fashion: to move people, to tell stories and to advocate for a fairer world.” Participating remotely in the voting process were Pablo Montanaro, president of Modacc – Catalan Fashion Cluster and director of our Postgraduate Program in Leadership and Innovation in the Creative Business, and Charo Mora, fashion culture specialist and co-director of the Master’s in Fashion Marketing, Communication and Event Planning. Martín Torres, co-founder and editor of Superflua and lecturer at the School, and strategic creative director Marta Marín acted as commissioners.
During the event, Martín Torres spoke about Locking’s work within the context of a generation shaped by major transformations in the industry: “Ana belongs to the second generation of Spanish designers of the democratic era, who had to deal with profound changes in a context marked by outsourcing and globalisation. These circumstances have deeply shaped her perspective and her narrative and artistic drive.” He also underlined the values that, in his view, define the coherence of her career: “As the Spanish poet and philosopher José María Valverde once said, there is no aesthetics without ethics.”
Ana Locking’s speech
After receiving the award, the designer delivered a speech in which she paid tribute to the legacy of Mrs Feli, as she was known, and placed her own work within a tradition of committed creative practice: “Receiving an award that bears the name of Felicidad Duce moves me for reasons that go beyond professional recognition. That name represents not only a pioneering legacy in education in Spain, but also a deeper idea: the conviction that knowledge, craft and creation are ultimately tools for emancipation.”
Locking shared her vision of fashion as a political practice and a space for critical thought: “Designing is not so much about producing forms as it is about organising questions and telling stories. I am interested in fashion when it stops being merely representation and also becomes language; when it not only embellishes bodies, but also questions how those bodies have historically been normalised, monitored, excluded and, at the same time, celebrated.”
The designer also warned about the risks of beauty detached from reality: “When beauty becomes disconnected from the complexity of the world, it runs the risk of turning into pure ornament of privilege.” She concluded her speech with a statement that encapsulated her career and philosophy: “Creating is a form of resistance. And imagining is a form of critique. There can be no possible future if we are unable to imagine it.”
A leading career
The jury highlighted Ana Locking’s “forward-thinking vision”, “defined by a unique ability to integrate critical thinking, aesthetic exploration and a humanistic reading of social and cultural change.” In its official statement, the jury noted that her work “positions fashion as a space for creative reflection that transcends the discipline itself, offering new ways of interpreting design and anticipating its possible futures.”
Locking’s institutional recognition includes the National Fashion Award (2020), the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2021) and the Culture Award of the Community of Madrid (2022). Alongside her work as a fashion designer, she has developed a practice in the field of contemporary art, with projects presented at institutions such as the Reina Sofía Museum, MUSAC, CA2M and CentroCentro. In 2021, she curated the exhibition Fire Talk With Me, which explored new ways of communicating fashion. This year, she presented her retrospective Nostalgia/Utopía at Sala Canal de Isabel II in Madrid, a journey through more than two decades of work understood as a dialogue between memory and the desire for the future.