How Zac Posen Went from Making Ball Gowns to Remaking the Gap
In 2010, the American fashion designer Zac Posen was promoting a new line of garments that he’d designed for Target when a reporter asked him about catering to a mass market. “I don’t like the word ‘mass,’ ” Posen responded. “I think of animals, of livestock.” As a more palatable alternative, he offered his own coinage, a glitzy (if somewhat unwieldy) portmanteau that he proudly embraces as a mantra to this day: “fashiontainment,” the kind of clothing that manages to infiltrate popular culture. Posen’s penchant for fashiontaining has been evident from his earliest years as a wunderkind luxury designer in early-two-thousands New York City. He founded his own label, House of Z, in 2001, at the age of twenty, outfitting movie starlets and downtown It Girls in Old Hollywood-style gowns. His designs earned him a reputation for precocious craftsmanship—the late Vogue editor André Leon Talley, a Posen champion, compared him to the master American couturier Charles James—but his status as a boy prince of the fashion world was achieved through a combination of charisma, social ambition, and a publicist’s instinct for, as he likes to put it, dressing the “right girl in the right dress at the right time.” Posen, a onetime judge on the reality show “Project Runway,” told me recently that his biggest heroes are not only fellow-designers but impresarios of the stage and screen, such as Walt Disney and Florenz Ziegfeld. “I’m a producer at heart,” he explained. “I like to put on a good show.”
Posen ran House of Z for nearly two decades, putting out runway collections under a self-named label. Then, in 2019, he was forced to abruptly shutter the company after his investors tried and failed to find a buyer. The loss of his brand capped a series of professional bruisings in the twenty-tens, as his business scrambled for new revenue streams, and he was cast as a cautionary figure who’d perhaps flagged under the weight of his own hype. During the pandemic, he considered leaving fashion altogether. Instead, in late 2023, he announced that he was taking a job as executive vice-president and creative director of Gap Inc., the retail conglomerate that includes the Gap and its sister brands, Athleta, Banana Republic, and Old Navy (where he also holds the title of chief creative officer). His appointment, by Gap Inc.’s new C.E.O., Richard Dickson, marked the first time that a single figure would oversee creative decisions across the entire enterprise. The fashion world, for the most part, reacted with perplexity. Why would a designer known for red-carpet looks and business woes be the best fit to steer a multibillion-dollar empire of denim and basic tees? Lauren Sherman, a fashion reporter for Puck, wrote, of the news, “No one—no one!—could have imagined.”
Posen’s hiring came at a moment when both he and the Gap stood to benefit from a reinvention. In the nineties, under the C.E.O. Mickey Drexler, the Gap was considered the go-to outfit of the stylish Everyperson. Ubiquitous TV commercials featuring young people swing dancing in khakis or lip-synching to “Mellow Yellow” gave the brand a sheen of fresh-faced relevance. Gap print ads were shot by Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts. The “Friends” cast wore the Gap. Sharon Stone wore Gap tops to the Oscars—twice. But sales peaked in 2000, and in 2002, after a seventeen-year tenure, Drexler was fired amid slumping profits. He went on to revitalize J. Crew. Gap Inc., meanwhile, struggled to adapt to a retail landscape increasingly dominated by e-commerce and fast-fashion competitors such as H&M and Uniqlo.
Posen saw in the company an opportunity to exploit his instinct for spectacle at a time when even so-called heritage brands were under pressure to compete in the attention economy. “Consumers don’t just want clothes anymore,” he said. “A brand needs to be a storyteller. That’s what Gap was in its heyday, and what it can be again.” But the Gap in its heyday was still just a retail clothing chain. Today, to get bodies into stores, the shopping experience must be theatrical, Instagrammable, gamified. Under Posen’s creative direction, Gap Inc. is attempting to become a sprawling hub of cultural production, with forays into high fashion, entertainment, and even food and drink—the Gap, but make it a café. His job takes place partly on the earthly plane of mass merchandise—Old Navy body mists, Banana Republic linens—and partly in the newfangled realm of, in the corporate-strategy parlance that he now throws around, “visioning” what more the brands can be.
On the day of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (C.F.D.A.) awards, a starry annual gala, last November, Posen was crouching in a carpeted hallway at Fouquet’s hotel, in Tribeca, fluffing out the train of a custom denim gown worn by Ejae, the mononymous Korean pop star who sang the lead role in the Netflix animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.” The garment was branded Zac Posen for GapStudio, the name of an atelier, launched by Posen last spring under the Gap umbrella, that specializes in gowns for celebrity clients which he “Gap-ifies” by using denim, khaki, white cotton shirting, and other sartorial “codes” associated with the brand. Ejae’s gown had a skintight halter top and a triangular bodice that was mitred at the center—a favored Posen technique, whereby two pieces of fabric are joined at a forty-five-degree angle to create a slimming illusion. Vertical stripes of denim had been intricately hand-distressed using Dremels, a process that took fifteen artisans more than ninety hours. The finished portions of fabric had the texture of spun sugar, with thousands of fine white threads protruding from the bluejean casings.
“It’s a real moment, isn’t it?” Posen said of the dress, popping off the floor with spring-coiled energy. In his youth, Posen’s strong eyebrows and curly dark hair, which he often slicked back, gave him a striking resemblance to Rudolph Valentino. Now forty-five, he has accrued a few crinkles in the corners of his eyes, though his cheeks are still taut and cherubically rosy. “Let’s make some content!” he said, blowing a kiss at videographers who were on hand to capture the preparations for social media.
One of Posen’s early custom-Gap successes, before the official launch of GapStudio, was a button-up shirtdress made of crisp white poplin which Anne Hathaway wore to a jewelry launch party thrown by Bulgari, in Rome, in 2024. She styled it inside out, so that the seams showed, and left it partially unbuttoned, so that one of its sleeves drooped insouciantly off her shoulder, accentuating a lavish diamond necklace around her throat. Photos of the look—part Italian countess, part American coed on spring break—went viral. At Posen’s urging, the Gap quickly put a version of the dress up on its website, for a hundred and fifty-eight dollars. It sold out within two hours.
Today, GapStudio makes both one-off custom designs for celebrities and limited-edition retail collections marketed at a slightly higher price point than typical Gap fare. Last year, Posen persuaded Apple Martin, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of his longtime client Gwyneth Paltrow, to appear, alongside her mother, in a GapStudio promotional campaign, wearing designs such as a double-breasted car coat ($278) and a vegan-patent-leather minidress ($148). It was one of several recent notable Gap ads—including throwback dance videos featuring Parker Posey and the global girl group Katseye—that have helped generate new buzz around the brand, prompting headlines heralding a “Gapaissance.” At the turn of the millennium, Gap Inc.’s market capitalization was forty billion dollars. Now it’s around a quarter of that, but during Posen’s tenure net sales have crept steadily upward. In January, the credit-rating agency Moody’s revised Gap Inc.’s status from “stable” to “positive.”
Posen speaks about design with an eager grandiloquence that over the years has alternately charmed and chafed observers in the fashion world. (When he was in his twenties, the critic Cathy Horyn described him as “a little bit adorable and a little bit awful.”) Riding with Ejae in a black car to the C.F.D.A.s, at the American Museum of Natural History, he delivered a disquisition on the properties of wool, at one point fingering a coil of an employee’s curly hair to demonstrate the elastic quality of natural fibres. But he is equally likely to hold forth on maritime lore, African dance, Stephen Sondheim, the history of the Radio City Rockettes, the filmography of Vincente Minnelli, or the Muppets (whose most glamorous member, Miss Piggy, he dressed for the Oscars in 2012). His conversational fluency is matched by his talent for Rolodex-building. He told me, of his first C.F.D.A. gala, in 2002, “I was sitting at the Swarovski table, and I met Helmut Swarovski, the O.G. of the company. That was the start of a relationship where he co-underwrote my shows.” Posen’s name-dropping has a flowchart momentum, each acquaintance branching off into subsequent friendships, projects, parties. He went on, “We did a show at the Four Seasons where we filled planters with crystals, and my life-of-the-party girlfriends just dove in, literally swimming in them. Years later, I did these amazing stockings covered with Swarovski crystals with Wolford, in Austria. That was my period of thinking about schnapps, schnitzel, and pantyhose.”
Many designers who dress celebrities do a couple of polite fittings and then ship the final pieces to their clients. Posen often chaperones his famous customers—Zac-ettes, he sometimes calls them—expertly schmoozing arm in arm on red carpets. He treats some looks as live productions, with himself as ringmaster. In 2016, for a technology-themed Met Gala, he dressed Claire Danes, a longtime friend and a fellow child of SoHo artists, in a fibre-optics-laced organza gown that glowed like a jellyfish, courtesy of thirty battery packs concealed within a capacious cupcake skirt. To accommodate the oversized creation, Posen chartered a Sprinter van to take them to the event, and asked the Met to saw the arms off of Danes’s dinner chair, so that she could fit into her seat. (“Uma Thurman had to help me pee,” Danes recalled. “I just appreciate how generally unafraid and audacious Zac is.”)
Ejae was not, like Danes or Natalie Portman or many of Posen’s past clients—Thurman, Molly Ringwald, Cynthia Erivo, Katie Holmes, Karen Elson—a friend from outside of work. The plan to dress her had been devised, for maximum pop-cultural impact, by Patty Chong, Gap Inc.’s senior head of celebrity and entertainment relations, a position that Posen helped to create soon after joining the company. He seemed to be working to generate rapport.
“There’s no corset in there!” he said of the dress. “I made it so she can breathe. A performer needs to perform!”
“I could even sing ‘Golden’ in this,” Ejae said, referring to a hit “Demon Hunters” song.
“Oh, please sing it!” Posen said.
“Gonna be, gonna be golden,” Ejae warbled. A makeup artist was powdering her face by the gleam of a portable ring light. An assistant asked if Ejae wanted a square of Dubai chocolate. She puckered her lips, considering, then said, “Later.” I asked Posen if he might put a version of Ejae’s dress on the market, as he had with Hathaway’s. He shook his head and said, “It took too much work.” But then he looked back at the dress and cocked his head. “O.K., but maybe,” he said, the retail gears in his brain beginning to turn. “We could take a photo of the shredded denim and print it on a voile or crêpe T-shirt, like trompe-l’oeil.”
In recent years, a wave of Y2K nostalgia among members of Gen Z has revived certain style hallmarks of the time. Ugg boots are back in. So are hair claws, spaghetti straps, and, against better judgment, boot-cut jeans. On Instagram, a popular account called @gapplaylists shares soundtracks that Gap piped into its stores in the nineties and two-thousands, a mix of classics and chart-toppers of the day—Lauryn Hill, Counting Crows, Avril Lavigne. American teen culture back then revolved largely around loitering at the mall, and the Gap was more or less the king of the shopping center, with some twenty-five hundred U.S. stores. (There are currently fewer than four hundred.) Many fans of Gap-store playlists on social media were in diapers during that era, but, as Posen puts it, “they romanticize the idea of it.”
Posen is late Gen X, born in 1980, but he never really knew mall culture firsthand. He grew up in a loft on Spring Street, in a milieu that he recalls as an ur-bohemian “cultural smorgasbord.” His father, Stephen, is a Yale-trained painter and photographer. His mother, Susan, began her career in book publishing, though by the time Zac, the couple’s second child, was born she had gone to law school and was supporting the family as an associate at a Wall Street firm. Posen remembers selling lemonade to gallerygoers on Spring Street, and a fashion show thrown by a “high-end kimono store” next door. His best friend, who lived upstairs, was the son of a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian. “So you’d hear Native American chanting from the elevator,” Posen said.
Creativity in the Posen house was a religion, though not always a communal one. The front half of the family loft was Stephen’s studio, which Posen was taught to think of as “a sacred space, not to be disturbed.” Posen, his mother, and his older sister, Alexandra, entered the apartment via a side entrance, and for a time Stephen kept a fortune-cookie message pinned to the studio door which read, “An open door is not always an invitation to come in.” Last spring, Posen took me to visit the loft. His parents weren’t there—they still own the place but live year-round at a farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—so we entered through the studio, which had high tin ceilings and smelled heavily of turpentine. “It’s still weird, after all these years, to come in his way,” Posen said.
What Posen did see of his father’s work had a formative effect. Stephen went through a phase of stretching textiles over cardboard boxes to create 3-D shapes on jumbo canvases. “That was the first time I saw draping in action,” Posen told me. Father and son would collect fabric that had been discarded on the street by local clothing factories. At the age of four, Posen made a miniature dress, using the wire and cork from a champagne bottle as a base, and started outfitting a She-Ra doll in custom clothes. Susan, whose grandmother was a seamstress, taught him how to use a sewing machine when he was six. Alexandra recalled, “He was making things all the time: sketching, sewing, sculpting, using tinfoil, yarmulkes, leather cutouts, fabric remnants, whatever.”
By middle school, Posen was experimenting with his own personal style, wearing dandyish ensembles of capes and old-fashioned jodhpurs or sailor pants. In ninth grade, he enrolled at St. Ann’s, a Brooklyn private school known for attracting the children of the creative élite. He showed up on his first day dressed like Charlie Chaplin and caught the eye of Lola Schnabel, a daughter of the artist Julian Schnabel and the designer Jacqueline Beaurang. Lola invited him over to her mom’s West Village brownstone, and the two became inseparable. She recalled, “I’d been surrounded all my life by interesting homosexuals, and I told him right away that I knew he was gay, and that it was wonderful.” (This wasn’t news to Posen—he had come out the previous summer, at a drama camp.)
Posen’s own parents were not, as he put it, “part of any scene,” but through Lola he was initiated into a world of influential downtown figures. The Vogue editor Grace Coddington was a neighbor of Beaurang’s, and the artist Rene Ricard, who’d been a fixture at Andy Warhol’s Factory, was her regular dinner guest. Posen began going out to night clubs and wearing increasingly eccentric outfits that he described as “vampiric-tribal-dandy-punk-romantic bricolage”—lime-green platform shoes, satin neck ruffs, a homemade faux-raccoon coat, a vintage muff. (“The muff was a little much,” his father told me.) During a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute when he was sixteen, Posen chatted up Richard Martin, then the institute’s head curator. Martin offered him an internship. “I remember the first time I got to see a Madeleine Vionnet up close,” Posen said, referring to the French designer who popularized the bias-cut gown. “I laid down right under it, and it totally changed my life.” Posen began making garments for his girlfriends, including what he called “morning-of dresses,” stitched in a single day for the recipient to wear dancing the same night. The writer and director Lena Dunham was a St. Ann’s student five years below Posen, and for a time Posen worked as her babysitter. She recalled him as “the couturier of our high school. He was doing exactly what he does now for the Met Gala, except for all the cool girls going to prom.” He attended graduation dressed as the Pope.
In 1999, Posen was accepted into the prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school, in London. He experimented with more avant-garde designs there, including transparent jumpsuits made out of parachute material. One of his pieces, an elaborate leather corset dress, was selected from a student showcase to be in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s permanent collection. But Posen’s biggest break involved a combination of happenstance and copious social connections. One day during his first year in London, when Lola Schnabel was living with him, she wore a bias-cut cocktail dress that he’d made, and her friend Naomi Campbell, the supermodel, asked where she could get one. Campbell soon became a devoted early customer. When Posen returned to New York over Christmas, he brought a flamenco-style pink cocktail dress that he’d made as a sample for Campbell and lent it to his St. Ann’s friend Paz de la Huerta—a daughter of Spanish nobility and a budding indie actress—to wear to a holiday party at the home of another friend, the future “Girls” star Jemima Kirke. At the party, de la Huerta danced while brandishing the gown’s frilly skirt like a matador’s cape. The journalist Daisy Garnett, who was in attendance, was so captivated that she wrote a story for the Times in which she deemed Posen’s creation “the best dress in the world.”
The breathless writeup kick-started Posen’s career. He returned to school for the spring semester, but in New York, he recalled, “things were taking off for me, and really rapidly.” That summer, buyers for the department store Henri Bendel asked to see Posen’s designs, so he converted his family’s living room into a makeshift atelier, hiring a cutter and a seamstress. Marc Bagutta, the owner of an influential SoHo boutique, proposed going into business together. Posen asked his mother for legal advice, and she began to manage his career. She told me, “I had enough of a business background to be sensible and sometimes a little outrageous, and it worked.” They turned down Bagutta’s offer and, flouting industry convention, insisted that Bendel pay for Posen’s garments up front.
That September, the Twin Towers fell, only a mile from Posen’s childhood home, and he felt a decisive pull toward remaining in New York. He dropped out of fashion school and launched House of Z, with his mother as C.E.O. and his sister as creative director. New York City hadn’t produced a homegrown fashion star since Marc Jacobs, in the early nineties, and in the months after 9/11 the fashion world was eager to tout its resilience by anointing Posen, a native son, as its next heir apparent. High-profile allies swarmed. Mary Loving, the first of multiple powerful publicists to work for Posen for free, helped him organize his first big solo runway show, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Guests included the formidable British fashion editor Isabella Blow and Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, who attended at the request of her son, another friend of Posen’s. John Frusciante, the guitarist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who was dating Lola Schnabel’s sister, Stella, composed an original score for the show, and Posen cast several of his own friends as models. The clothing was polished, but the mood was loose. Jemima Kirke wiggled down the runway in a powder-pink midi dress, looking like a tipsy flapper. Wintour (who is now the global chief content officer of Condé Nast) told me, “We had very few young designers who could go up against the big guns.” She added, “You went to one of Zac’s shows and you just felt this generational shift.”
Designers often appear briefly on the catwalk at the end of their shows to wave to the crowd. Posen walked the full runway, wearing a tuxedo with tails, and took an exaggerated bow. Some saw the display as a welcome departure from the industry’s stuffy decorum. At the very least, it reflected an unbashful approach to self-promotion which served Posen well as an up-and-comer. He told Horyn, the critic, “I’m definitely planning ahead for a brand that spans the universe, a Zac Posen universe.” Belinda Luscombe, writing in Time, noted that most fashion designers grow more market-conscious in the course of their careers, as they bend to the pressures of maintaining a business. Posen, with his flattering gowns and showmanlike personality, “seems to have been born commercial,” she wrote, adding, “Maybe when he’s forty-five, he’ll be the most radical designer around.”
The lobby of the Gap Inc. headquarters, in San Francisco’s financial district, features a large black-and-white photograph of the Gap’s co-founders, the late husband-and-wife team Donald and Doris Fisher, standing in front of the first Gap store. It opened, in the San Francisco neighborhood of Ingleside, in 1969, selling only LPs, cassettes, and Levi’s. The name was a reference to “the generation gap”—however wide the cultural chasms between American youth and their elders, the Fishers figured that Americans of all ages could agree upon jeans. One morning last June, Posen met me at Gap Inc. wearing sunglasses indoors, Anna Wintour style. “Forgive the eyewear,” he said. “I scratched my cornea. But it’s kind of a fetching look, no?” We walked through the building’s soaring atrium, which houses a coffee shop called Fisher Brew and a hulking Richard Serra sculpture from the Fishers’ extensive art collection. A floor display for Old Navy activewear featured Lindsay Lohan, a fellow emblem of millennial pop culture who has been engineering something of a comeback. “That badass girl once hijacked a gown of mine, I think from Rachel Zoe’s closet, and wore it to the Met Gala,” Posen said. “She’s also, by the way, one of the most professional people I’ve ever worked with.”
Posen knew little about Gap’s history before starting the job. Now, he said, he’s “obsessed.” His lodestar is Drexler, the former C.E.O., who transformed the Gap from a domestic denim emporium into a global force in merchandising. In addition to more entrepreneurial accomplishments—such as founding Old Navy, the company’s most lucrative label, in 1994—Drexler refined the Gap’s branding toward an uncluttered, Scandinavian-lite aesthetic. In business correspondence, Posen likes to use a blue Sharpie whose ink matches the hue of a Gap logo that Drexler introduced in 1988, featuring a white serif font against a navy square. (Drexler told me, by phone, that he admires Posen’s “innate ability to get attention,” but added, “He still has quite a challenge ahead of him to get Gap back to its important place in American style.”)
Posen technically still lives in New York, with his fiancé, the ballet dancer and choreographer Harrison Ball, in an Upper East Side duplex decorated in the kind of high-boho style that suggests both exacting taste and the means to pursue it—velvet settees, mismatched Persian rugs, vases of fresh flowers that he grows in a terrace garden. But he now spends at least half of his time in a rental house in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, a onetime artistic enclave that has become crowded with Silicon Valley executives. Posen estimates that he made more than forty cross-country trips last year. “I redesigned Delta’s uniforms in 2018, so they treat me like royalty,” he said.
The Gap’s two preceding creative directors, Patrick Robinson and Rebekka Bay, were corporate-world veterans with little name recognition, and both struggled to make an imprint on the brand. Robinson held the position for four years; Bay lasted only two. After Bay’s departure, in 2015, Gap Inc.’s C.E.O. at the time, Art Peck, chose not to replace her, calling creative directors “false messiahs.” In 2020, seeking a flashier partnership, Gap Inc. collaborated with Kanye West on a line that was projected to generate more than a billion dollars in sales over ten years. Two years later, West pulled out of the deal.
Richard Dickson arrived at Gap Inc., in the summer of 2023, as the fourth in a series of short-lived C.E.O.s. He had first crossed paths with Posen several years before, when Dickson was the president and chief operating officer at Mattel; Posen had pitched him the idea of an American Boy Doll, who would be an aspiring fashion designer. When Dickson joined the Gap, it “arguably had revenue, but we didn’t have relevance,” he said. “We needed to symbolically show that design and creativity is going to matter.” He initially approached Posen about a job as the creative director of Old Navy only. To Posen, the idea seemed far-fetched. “I hadn’t been inside an Old Navy in probably fifteen years,” he said.
But in October of 2023, they met in New York, over fries at Balthazar, and had what Posen described as a “cosmic moment” of joint visioning. Posen brainstormed ideas for making over each brand in Gap Inc.’s portfolio. Athleta, the company’s fitness-focussed label, should embed itself more visibly in the world of professional sports. Banana Republic, long criticized for its colonial iconography, should shift its narrative to emphasize “the modern explorer.” Old Navy should introduce designer collaborations and sleeker accessories to offset its reputation as bargain-basement. And the Gap, the “jewel” of the company, should drive the culture in fashion and beyond. Posen had been in talks with several historic French fashion houses about creative-director jobs. He came close to accepting one position (it was rumored to be either Lanvin or Givenchy, and he told me, winkingly, “It’s not Lanvin”), and he and Ball had begun planning a move to Paris. But he’d also met with Hollywood producers, thinking that he might like to start his own film studio, and in Dickson, who at Mattel had helped oversee the “Barbie”-movie phenomenon, he found a like-minded partner in fashiontainment. Soon after Posen got the job, Gap Inc. trademarked the term, which is now peppered throughout its press releases.
In Posen’s telling, the corporate grind is just another creative odyssey. Business meetings, he insisted, can be a “kind of art form.” At headquarters, we sat in a conference room as a phalanx of Gap-clad employees discussed the use of A.I. in merchandise design. Posen nodded along while doodling in a notebook with his blue Sharpie. (He was diagnosed with A.D.D. as a kid, he told me, and keeping his hands occupied helps him focus.) One employee demonstrated a program that could generate a garment pattern based on ChatGPT-like prompts—“girl in a pink tutu,” “woman in a khaki trench.” Posen looked intrigued.
“How culturally intelligent can the prompts be?” he asked. “Could I say, ‘Let’s make the camel coat more Carolyn Bessette’?”
A program engineer with an Eastern European accent, speaking via video chat, assured him that he could do that and much more: “You can say you want to get it in the style of the ‘Tron’ movie. You know the ‘Tron’ movie? And you’ll get something glowing in neon.”
From there, Posen flitted among meetings with the other brands, doling out opinionated enthusiasm. At Athleta, he inspected an upcoming collection of cross-back sports bras, whose straps he deemed admirably stretchy. At Old Navy, he strode around with a slouchy black tote from the brand’s new Bag Shop slung over his shoulder. (The actress Jenna Ortega, who has been known to carry a hundred-thousand-dollar Aupen purse, would soon be spotted carrying the tote. Retail price: thirty-six dollars.) At a “visual merchandising” meeting at Banana Republic, he perused window-display props that included cardboard cutouts of zebras and a rotating plane propeller. “These are a little Jonathan Adler,” he said of a stack of white books with a large white plaster egg perched on top. “I think it’s better when we lean more toward a Brancusi vibe.”
Gen Z-ers don’t just want to buy things; they want TikTok-able “experiences,” and many retail brands have diversified accordingly: a Ralph Lauren coffee truck in Rockefeller Center draws lines that often snake around the block; at Skims, on Fifth Avenue, the elevators are equipped with mirrored doors and halo lighting to encourage selfie-snapping. In January, Gap Inc. hired a former Paramount executive as its first chief entertainment officer, to oversee licensing and partnerships in “music, TV, film, sports, gaming and more.” One wall in Posen’s office was covered with vision boards outlining potential “retailtainment” ideas—Gap-branded photo booths, an in-store skate park, cafés serving gazpacho-flavored Gap popsicles. In the meantime, there has been Gap x Sushi Club, a collaboration with the celebrity chef Nobu Matsuhisa involving a T-shirt, a hoodie, and a trucker hat whose Gap logos feature a pair of crossed chopsticks in lieu of the “A.” Posen described a forthcoming Old Navy flagship store in Herald Square, in rhapsodic corporate-speak, as a kind of theme park, “very much in the spirit of Walt Disney’s belief in ‘creating happiness for people of all ages, everywhere.’ ”
There is a photo on Posen’s phone which was taken at a low moment, in 2021, after the closing of House of Z. He’d been dressing up and going out, extravagantly, his entire adult life. Now, during a trip to Malibu to clear his head, he sat alone on the beach in loose jeans and a plain white Gap T-shirt. L.A. listlessness can be spun as its own kind of glamour—Posen prefers to think of that time as his “Joan Didion moment”—but unfussy personal style was still a foreign concept to him. He said, of the Gap tee, “I don’t even know how that shirt ended up in my world.”
Even at the height of Posen’s black-tie era, his brand operated in a state of financial precarity. “There was no hidden daddy or mommy money,” he said. “I put on the tux and went out every night because that’s what I had to do to sell it. Then I would come back to the studio and drape through the night and sleep on the couch.” He hawked his wares on the trunk-show circuit, a sort of designer pop-up tour. During an early show in L.A., he recalled, “suddenly, all these Rolls-Royces came down from the Hills, like Norma Desmond in her limousine.” The hustle was productive but exhausting—“Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, and Coral Gables, every season, for fifteen years.”
In 2003, on the night of the C.F.D.A. awards, Posen struck up a conversation with the music mogul Sean Combs. Combs, who is now serving more than four years in prison for prostitution-related crimes, had achieved success with a streetwear brand, Sean John, and was looking to make inroads into high fashion. He offered to supply Posen with capital in exchange for a fifty-per-cent stake in the business. The partnership thrust Posen deeper into the entertainment world. “I’d be in the studio with Pharrell, or there when Missy Elliott was, like, finalizing her album,” he recalled. He and Combs co-hosted a 2004 C.F.D.A. after-party that was attended by Beyoncé and Jay-Z. (Alluding to the notorious sex-and-drug-fuelled “freak-offs” that became a subject of the criminal case against Combs, Posen said, “I never, ever went to one of Sean’s parties, thank God.”) Posen began making glitzier ready-to-wear, embellished with fur, flowers, and feathers, and putting on bombastic runway shows that drew a high-low spectrum of famous faces—Chuck Close, Liza Minnelli, Rihanna, Jenna and Barbara Bush. “I took a lot of shit for focussing so much on dressing people for the red carpet,” he told me. “Now every fashion brand has their own celebrity-relations department.”
When the 2008 recession hit, the millennial decadence that Posen represented began to seem out of step with the times. In 2009, New York Fashion Week shuffled its calendar, and Posen, who for years had enjoyed prime evening billing, ended up with an unfashionably early Monday-morning slot. Not long afterward, the Times Style section published a piece titled “The Trials of a Former Boy Wonder,” detailing Posen’s financial struggles and calling him a fashion-world Icarus who’d gone “too far, too fast.” The article noted that he had gained a reputation for diva-ish petulance, lashing out in response to negative media coverage and complaining to the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar about a photo shoot that would have featured him alongside characters from “Sesame Street”—he’d been denied more serious spreads, he claimed, because his company couldn’t afford to be a print advertiser.
In the fall of 2010, Posen decided to pull his namesake label from New York Fashion Week and stage a “renegade runway show” at Paris Fashion Week instead. For his venue, he chose a ballroom where Yves Saint Laurent had débuted many lauded couture collections, but Posen’s collection was heavy on pink feathers, black lace, and other flirtations with “Moulin Rouge” kitsch. The show got a cool reception. Christina Binkley, who panned the looks in the Wall Street Journal as “boudoir games,” told me, “I think he got in his head.”
House of Z’s setbacks exacerbated growing tensions in Posen’s working relationship with his mother and his sister. As C.E.O., Susan had concocted creative solutions to help the company’s bottom line, including having the pasta-sauce brand Bertolli sponsor a fashion-show after-party. “I was angry about that,” Posen recalled. “I felt that she was trying to sell me cheap.” He wasn’t above going strategically down-market, however. In 2010, following the example of so-called diffusion lines such as Marc Jacobs’s Marc by Marc and Donna Karan’s DKNY, he launched a sub-brand, Z Spoke, in partnership with Saks Fifth Avenue. But it failed to take off, and his one brick-and-mortar store, a tiny Z Spoke in the meatpacking district, was short-lived. He developed a fragrance—a single hit perfume can keep a designer in the black indefinitely—but the firm he was working with folded before the scent could launch. Susan had begun to feel that her son’s company was outgrowing her expertise. “I think she stayed to protect me and this family of employees we built,” Posen said. In the end, though, his Paris gambit proved to be a breaking point: “I pushed everyone hard, and it was distressing.”
A month after the show, Susan stepped down as C.E.O. She was replaced by an executive from Scoop, a fashion brand funded by Yucaipa, a corporation owned by the billionaire supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, who’d taken over Combs’s investment after buying a stake in Sean John. Posen’s sister had also resigned. “It was a really lonely and confusing time,” he said. “There was an article that came out around then, ‘Everybody Hates Zac Posen.’ There were rumors that I was a drug addict, which was totally outrageous. I felt that everyone who supported me had gone away.” One day in June, during a visit with Posen to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania, Susan told me that, after she left the company, “Zac and I took some space, where we had to untangle the part of me that was working with him and the part of me that was his mom.” In 2022, she was diagnosed with metastatic bladder cancer, and the disease has recently advanced; in early March, she estimated that she had only weeks to live. Posen told me that they’ve “completely repaired” their relationship. “I don’t want to curse, but I want to say she did a fucking incredible job, O.K.?” he said. “I think that blood is stronger than anything.”
Under the new C.E.O., Posen pivoted his runway collections to focus almost exclusively on evening wear. In the fall of 2011, he staged a “New York comeback show” at Lincoln Center, featuring a parade of exquisite ball gowns. He found a niche clientele of aristocrats from as far away as Dubai, but as Binkley, the critic, put it, “Even Oscar de la Renta could not survive on gowns alone.” To underwrite his opulent designs, he went on a mass-market licensing spree, lending the Zac Posen name to sunglasses, high heels, costume jewelry, and wedding gowns for David’s Bridal. He also took on a side gig, as the creative director of women’s wear for Brooks Brothers, and the role on “Project Runway.”
Fashion has always been a business of patronage, with artists vulnerable to the whims of wealthy backers, and hindsight has proved that the fashion and entertainment industries of the millennial era were magnets for unsavory moneymen. Posen’s “Project Runway” job was brokered by Harvey Weinstein, the now disgraced sex offender who was then an executive producer on the show and, along with Sean Combs, a close associate of Ron Burkle’s. (More recently, Burkle’s name surfaced on the flight logs for Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, although Burkle reportedly found Epstein “creepy” after a one-way trip and flew commercial home. According to Vanity Fair, Burkle’s aides used to refer to his own private plane, on which he took frequent trips with his friend Bill Clinton, as Air Fuck One. Burkle has not been accused of wrongdoing.)
When I asked about his own association with Combs and Weinstein, he told me that they “were at the center of the culture” at the time, and that he had no knowledge of the “abhorrent behaviors that have since been exposed.” Weinstein had asked Posen to join “Project Runway” when it was first in development. “I didn’t do that, so he was really furious,” Posen said. “He told me I wouldn’t dress anybody in Hollywood ever again, and stomped his fist on a table, Louis B. Mayer style, and didn’t talk to me for ten years.” (A representative for Weinstein said that this “isn’t true from Harvey’s recollection” and that he and Posen “got along very well.”) Posen at first worried that doing reality TV would undermine his standing in the fashion world, but he grew into a “Project Runway” evangelist—the show, he said, is “the ultimate fashiontainment.”
Judging “Project Runway” had made Posen’s predecessor on the show, Michael Kors, an industry giant—in 2011, his namesake brand had one of the biggest fashion I.P.O.s to date—but the job did more for Posen’s name recognition than for his bottom line. By early 2019, Burkle’s Yucaipa was trying to sell House of Z. Posen travelled to Asia in search of a buyer, but ultimately, he said, “the patience for a sale ran out.” That October, the board of managers decided to cease business operations, effective immediately. “It was, like, ‘Needles down, pack up your office.’ I had to let sixty employees go, some I’d been working with since I was twenty, with less than an hour’s notice,” Posen said. “I remember going home and sitting by my fireplace for two days straight, just staring. ” In the legal fallout, Burkle won the rights both to Posen’s name and to his archive of thousands of runway designs. His name was sold off to Centric Brands, a holding company known for snapping up troubled I.P. To this day, his garments remain in Yucaipa’s custody, with Posen granted only visitation rights. Still, Posen wanted it known that he is “deeply grateful” to Burkle for having funded the business in the first place.
In March, 2020, COVID-19 brought the fashion industry to a standstill. Designers who kept their ateliers open resorted to making masks. Brooks Brothers filed for Chapter 11, and Posen quietly departed, leaving him fully unemployed for the first time in two decades. He had, by then, met Ball, who was a rising star at the New York City Ballet. “I understood Zac and what he was going through, because we were both basically child performers with prodigy syndrome,” Ball told me. Many designers get rich selling their trademarks, and Ball recalls people congratulating Posen on his early retirement. “Everyone thought that he cashed out, like how Donna Karan got ninety million dollars or whatever,” Ball said. “But that was not the case at all.” On the contrary, Posen was suddenly cash-strapped. He said, “I was fielding calls from people requesting clothing, the whole alphabet of stars and stylists, and it was wonderful to be wanted, and also kind of tragic to not be able to deliver, because I simply could not afford to do a free one-of-a-kind piece. ”
In the fall of 2020, with Fashion Week cancelled because of the pandemic, Posen staged a public draping session in Central Park, creating impromptu looks on dress forms while a crowd observed from a safe distance. He used architectural folds of beige silk and surgical mesh—and, in one case, as an homage to a beleaguered New York City, built a bodice out of a “Thank You for Shopping” plastic bag. In the following years, he took one-off costuming gigs—bias slip dresses for a ballet performance that Ball choreographed; peacocking mid-century gowns for Ryan Murphy’s TV show “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans”—working out of his parents’ empty loft with just one assistant. “I was going around to fabric shops, like I did as a teen-ager,” he recalled. “It was kind of like the feeling of putting on my first collection again.”
Posen said that this comparatively quiet period brought him closer to his father. In Pennsylvania, Stephen took us out to a large stone barn that serves as his studio, where painted canvases were stacked along the walls. He estimated that some two thousand of his pieces have never been publicly seen, and he invoked a saying attributed to the artist John Cage, about working in one’s studio “completely alone,” free of “the past, your friends, enemies, the art world.” Stephen added, “My whole history has been about fighting for that space.”
I wondered if Posen had ever felt judged by his father for his own commercial impulses. He said no. “That’s not what my dad values,” he told me. “But there’s a vulnerability in putting my work out there in the world. I think it takes a certain fortitude to be in that kind of continuous, ongoing cultural dialogue.” Lately, Posen has been wearing his dad’s old fedoras paired with outfits from the Gap or Banana Republic. The latter’s flagship location is just around the corner from the Posen family’s loft. During a recent redesign of the store, Posen hung several of Stephen’s paintings on the walls. Stephen, for his part, chooses to see Posen’s Gap Inc. work as an exercise in creative constraint. “Bluejeans aren’t going to change radically,” he said. “So the question becomes: How are you going to tweak them, within your limitations?”
Posen has dressed stars for the Met Gala almost every year since 2004. He first went to the event in 1997, at the age of sixteen, when he was a Costume Institute intern. Even when he was out of work in 2022, Anna Wintour let him attend as a guest for free (though he had to go stag). Designing custom gowns for the Gap wasn’t part of his original brief, but, several months into the job, Met Gala season came around, and he went to Dickson with an idea. The actress Da’Vine Joy Randolph had asked him for a dress to wear to the 2024 Academy Awards, and he’d had to turn her down. What if he went back to Randolph—now a newly minted Oscar winner, for her role in “The Holdovers”—and offered to make her a Gap-branded look for that year’s Gala? He designed Randolph a stately denim corset number: the first Gap-ified Posen design.
GapStudio now makes around twenty red-carpet looks per year, plus four small-scale retail collections, out of the company’s offices in Tribeca. Posen likes to refer to the studio as his “laboratory,” a place to coax denims and cottons into unfamiliar new states. At a secondhand store in San Francisco, I’d watched him buy a worn T-shirt off the proprietor’s back, hoping to replicate its diaphanous, striated texture. One of his innovations is a proprietary material he calls “liquid denim,” a slippery acid-washed synthetic blend. He encouraged me to buy a liquid-denim shirtdress, which had a surprisingly lightweight quality and mother-of-pearl snap buttons, a subtle upgrade from the standard Gap fastenings. Other recent GapStudio pieces are less obviously wearable—a midriff-baring tuxedo vest, a “shrunken cardigan” cropped just underneath the bustline, a boxy men’s satin suit based on an outfit that Posen made for Timothée Chalamet. GapStudio items are not meant to compete with luxury clothes. “Our customers don’t want the Row from us,” Posen said. The goal is to put a designer spin on mass-market items: instead of Posen gowns that have been Gap-ified, they’re Gap clothes that have been “Zac-ified.” The company declined to share production or sales numbers with me, but the collections’ commercial success seems to matter less than ample publicity and an artisanal aura. Dickson told me, of GapStudio, “It haloes the entire brand.”
In November, Gap Inc.’s third-quarter fiscal report revealed that earnings for 2025 had increased five per cent compared with the year before, continuing a positive trend that’s now run for eight quarters straight. Gap Inc.’s current trajectory is no guarantee of the future—J. Crew had a similar reputational turnaround in the mid-two-thousands, only to declare bankruptcy in 2020—but it has contributed to a sense that Posen’s imprimatur has paid off. During a November earnings call with investors, Dickson shouted out Posen for bringing attention to the brand both “on the runway” and “on Main Street.” Afterward, a friend of Posen’s in finance texted to say that an earnings-call mention was “the equivalent in business of getting an Oscar.”
Around the same time, Posen moved offices, from a space on the Old Navy floor to an executive-level suite just across the hall from Dickson’s. It includes a draping station, complete with a wall of mirrors, like Halston once had, so that between meetings Posen can, as he put it, “get my hands wet in clay” designing for GapStudio. He wears kneepads when working on hems, and a pincushion wrist bracelet; when he’s done, he fastens his pieces directly onto their mannequins and ships them in refrigerator-size boxes back to the atelier in New York. For this year’s Oscars, he dressed the “Euphoria” star Barbie Ferreira in a blue silk moiré gown whose skirt resembled a Gap button-down shirt.
During several visits to the atelier last year, I saw one-of-a-kind looks in various stages of development: a denim pants suit and ruffled blouse, for Uma Thurman; a “custom Athleta” dress in sequinned spandex, for Simone Biles; and an ivory Met Gala ensemble, for the up-and-coming actress and model Laura Harrier. Last fall, the actress Zoey Deutch, Posen’s longtime friend and client, asked him for a garment to wear to the Academy Museum Gala, in L.A. She envisioned a princess gown in cherry red—a look that Posen admitted was more “Zac coded than Gap coded.” He decided to take the job anyway, as an exception for a Zac-ette. In a bit of prepositional gymnastics, the dress was branded not “Zac Posen for GapStudio” but “Zac Posen Made in GapStudio.” It had a V-shaped halter neckline that plunged almost to Deutch’s navel; the skirt billowed voluminously, like a giant upside-down poppy in bloom. The next day, Gap was flooded with calls from celebrity publicists requesting similar looks. The director of Gap Studio, Sonia Traikia, who also worked for Posen during the height of his evening-wear phase, told me, “My team can make a corset with our eyes closed. It’s making T-shirts and jeans that has been a bit of a learning curve.” ♦