The fashion industry lives off youth - or so it claims, at least. That's what makes it so interesting that five Spanish models from the nineties are still working, and not as a nostalgic exhibit but as active faces of the world's biggest fashion houses. Their story is a quiet challenge to the rule that in fashion you matter only while you're new.

The best known among them, Nieves Alvarez, began her career in 1991 after family photos reached an agency in Madrid. Today, at 52, she regularly walks for haute couture and is soon to marry in a gown by a designer she has worked with for years. Ines Sastre, also 52, made a dramatic return to the runway after nearly three decades away, walking at Madrid Fashion Week.

Laura Ponte cemented her collaboration with Chanel, debuting on their haute couture runway, and in March she received an award for best model. Ester Caniadas, who at 15 went from Barcelona to the world's runways through the eye of a famous photographer, is still represented by agencies in New York, Milan, London and Hamburg. And Vanessa Lorenzo, who at 18 became the face of a brand in Paris, returns to the runway occasionally but significantly.

What keeps them there? According to the industry, it's something that doesn't age: character, attitude, and a special way of owning the camera. Designers don't seek them out of nostalgia - they seek them because they have a presence that many of today's twenty-somethings have not yet built. Experience, it turns out, doesn't depreciate as easily as the industry likes to claim.

There's a message here too for those of us not in the fashion world. For decades society has told us that a woman's worth declines with age - especially in professions where looks are part of the job. These five women are writing the opposite story, quietly and without many words: that presence, when it's authentic, doesn't expire on the deadlines others set for you.