Can Zac Posen, known for over-the-top glamour, reinvent the mall brand Gap – and change his reputation in the process?
On Friday morning, just at the start of New York Fashion Week, more than 1000 designers, models, factory workers, editors, retailers and influencers will march to Bryant Park to get
In other words, what is essentially a giant Old Navy show is going to be one of the first big events of New York Fashion Week.
“Crazy, right?” Posen said a few weeks earlier. He was in his office at Gap Inc.’s headquarters in San Francisco, showing off a sample T-shirt. Crazy, he meant, that most of New York fashion would deign to don the same tee – and crazy that it would be one of his.
After all, in 2019, Posen, became the cautionary tale of the industry: the hot shot who lost his way, his name and his brand, in the wilds of ego and private equity. Since then, he had been cobbling together a freelance collaboration here, a private commission there, to make ends meet. He was, professionally, off the radar.
So were Old Navy and its parent company, Gap Inc., the onetime avatar of cool Americana that had turned khakis and a white T-shirt into a billion-dollar behemoth. Overexpansion and excessive discounting had sent it on a 20-year decline, left behind by fast-fashion giants Zara and H&M. A series of CEOs had promised turnarounds, only to see sales slow and the stock fall ever further. An ill-fated deal in 2020 with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, left the company with egg on its face.
The group is still big – last year’s sales were US$14.9 billion – but it had become “just product,” said Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast. “It had the name, it had the recognition, but there was no sense of excitement.”
Then, in August 2023, Richard Dickson, Mattel’s “Barbie” mastermind, was hired as CEO. He decided that one of the problems with Gap was fear of taking risks. So he took one.
In February, he hired Posen to be chief creative officer of Old Navy and executive vice-president and creative director of Gap Inc. The two newly created positions make Posen his “creative partner” overseeing products, advertising and stores for all Gap brands – not just Old Navy but also Gap, Banana Republic and Athleta.
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Advertise with NZME.The stakes are high for Posen and the company. The only thing pop culture loves more than an odd-couple story is a resurrection story. This has the potential to be both. But there is also a fine line between being relevant and being elitist. Get it wrong, and it could be a disaster.
Posen is all in. He has traded his suits and tuxedos for jeans.
“When I met him, he was always wearing a suit,” said Harrison Ball, Posen’s fiance, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. “He existed on a red carpet. That’s what his company and his career demanded of him. I’m cleaning a 20-year-old storage unit right now. It’s like, tuxedo, tuxedo, tuxedo, tuxedo.”
During the early months of the pandemic, Ball said, Posen “started to wear jeans and took his shoes off and stopped styling his hair”.
The two got engaged two years ago, and they have gone through their career transitions together. Ball’s last season with the ballet coincided with Posen’s freelance period, and the designer came to every one of Ball’s performances, sitting in the first ring in the seat that used to be George Balanchine’s and making dinner for assorted dancers afterwards.
“But I chose to leave,” Ball said. “Zac didn’t. He was forced to make that choice.” It was, he said, “devastating.”
Posen prefers to think of his current job as another stage in his hero’s journey, the one that took him from SoHo, where he was raised by an artist father and a lawyer mother; to St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn; to Central Saint Martins in London, holding his first fashion show at 21 and founding the House of Z, the name of the operating company that owned his brand.
His descent came after years of struggling to build the business. In 2019, his private equity backer, Ronald Burkle’s Yucaipa Cos., decided it was time for its exit and, after failing to find a buyer, wound down the House of Z, selling all of its intellectual property and archives. (Posen received nothing.) That was just before Covid lockdowns put fashion on pause for months – a dark period that prepared Posen to scale the heights, or at least the 15-storey headquarters, of Gap Inc.
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Advertise with NZME.“Everything has led to this,” Posen said. “This” being his new office, and life, in San Francisco; “everything” being the multiple side gigs he took on to finance his own business that helped school him in accessibility. See his line with David’s Bridal, his stint designing the uniforms for Delta Air Lines, his work as the head of Brooks Brothers womenswear and his six years as a judge on Project Runway.
Even if, he said, Gap wasn’t on his radar “at all”. Even if he remembered thinking on his first day, “What am I doing here?”
Yet it was Posen’s experience with failure that Dickson said was part of what attracted him to the designer when they first met.
“I really appreciated that Zac had gone through very difficult periods of his career,” Dickson said. It’s the ability to handle both success and challenge that is critical, he said, “when you’re in a leadership role at this level and scale.”
At this moment, as fashion segues into entertainment, Posen may actually have stumbled into his ideal job.
He feels as if the needle is moving. When he began approaching designers for collaborations, the answers, he said, were almost always: “Let’s see. We’re not ready for that. We love Zac, but we’re not sure it’s right for us.” Now, he said, he has a slate of names lined up. The group’s second quarter results, released at the end of August, beat sales expectations. There may even be a full-fledged show next year. In the meantime, along with outfitting the fashion week march, Old Navy is also throwing a 30th-anniversary bash during the New York collections.
The point is, Posen said, those Old Navy T-shirts (which are going to be sold in stores) don’t just say “Vote.” They say, Posen noted, “We’re ready to be part of the conversation again.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vanessa Friedman
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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