The wife of Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has appeared on the catwalk at Milan Fashion Week a year after being released from prison.

Emma Coronel Aispuro, 35, a former model who married El Chapo when she was a teenager, appeared in a regal wedding dress as part of what the designer called her “rebirth”.

Ms Coronel was sentenced to three years in prison in 2021 after pleading guilty to charges related to helping her husband’s Sinaloa cartel, including participating in his escape from custody in 2015.

Prosecutors determined she “worked closely with the command and control structure” of the cartel.

Under her plea deal, she agreed to hand over about $1.5 million in illicit funds from the cartel. Her sentence was later reduced and she was released from jail in September last year.

El Chapo, 67, whose criminal empire was known for its brutality and murderous rampages, continues to serve a life sentence – without the possibility of parole – in a supermax prison in Colorado.

Ms Coronel’s father, Inés Coronel, was also a senior member of the Sinaloa cartel and is serving a 10-year sentence in Mexico for drug smuggling.

However, on Sunday, Ms Coronel, who has both Mexican and US citizenship, dispatched of her “past marked with controversy” in a bid to “rewrite her future”, according to LA-based designer April Black Diamond, who made the cartel wife the star of her spring/summer 2024 collection.

Her surprise return to the modelling world took place in Palazzo Serbelloni, a neoclassical palace in Milan, where Napoleon once lived.

Ms Coronel wore a tiara and a heavily white gown adorned with jewels.

“As a designer, I believe everyone deserves a second chance, and fashion is the perfect platform to highlight transformation, strength, and resilience,” Ms Diamond, wrote on Instagram last week.

The designer, who dresses the Hollywood elite and specialties in lavish party dresses, added that her work celebrates “resilience, rebirth, and the beauty of transformation on this global stage”.

Mariel Colón Miró, a model and lawyer who was part of El Chapo’s defence team in the US, also joined Ms Coronel on the catwalk at Sunday’s event.

‘Right to fulfil our dreams’

“We all have the right to fulfil our dreams and to be reborn like the bird and start over,” she wrote on social media.

Ms Coronel became a beauty queen at age 17, winning her first pageant in Canelas, Mexico, in 2007. She met her future husband the same year.

In an interview, she told the LA Times: “He flirtatiously smiled at me. After a while a person told me, ‘The man asks if you want to dance with him’. And I said, ‘OK’.”

After a whirlwind romance, she became El Chapo’s third wife at the age of 18, while he was 50.

They share two twin daughters, Emaly and Maria Joaquina, born in 2011, who are believed to be the youngest of 19 children the cartel boss has fathered.