Zac Posen and his design team are finishing a custom dress for an actress. He has done this countless times before under his namesake line, which was shuttered in 2019. The difference today is that he is doing it via Zoom from a corner office at Gap Inc.’s corporate mother ship in San Francisco. And there is some question about whether the gown, made of Gap’s lightweight T-shirt material, will provide the actress with enough support.
“She doesn’t need boning, I don’t think,” Posen tells his team in New York, “but she does like being controlled and smooth. She has to be able to wear a bra.”
Outside, ships and helicopters glide across the turquoise expanse of San Francisco Bay. “It’s like the craziest screensaver ever,” Posen says. “The weather changes so dramatically. I’ll be in meetings, and it’s like Wagner outside. Or Chopin. It’s trippy.” Since starting the job as the creative director of Gap Inc. and chief creative officer of Old Navy a year ago, Posen has relocated to the city part-time. When I saw him in New York the previous week, he had flown in late on a Sunday, dressed Cynthia Erivo in a hooded black velvet gown—inspired by the Gap hoodie—for the CFDA awards Monday night, and caught a 5 a.m. flight back the next morning to get in a full day at the office. “I’m basically on the plane every other week,” he says. “It’s like teleporting: I close my eyes and hope for Wi-Fi.”
Posen’s job, which Gap Inc. CEO Richard Dickson invented for him, is not very clearly defined. Posen chimes in on design, retail, and advertising across the company’s stable of brands: Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta. But the only collection he’s actually designing is GapStudio, a new line arriving in March (with a limited collection of holiday pieces available at gap.com on December 12) intended as an elevated take on Gap classics. The 53-piece collection includes tailored sailor pants, trenches in denim and khaki, logo sweatshirts, and new colorways of the so-called Anne Hathaway dress, named after the shirtdress Posen created for the actress to wear to a Bvlgari event last year. “Because it was Zac, I knew it wasn’t going to be just a shirtdress,” Hathaway tells me. Inspired by Gap’s shirting, the dress had off-shoulder cap sleeves, a hip-high slit, and an exposed sheer corset. “He himself is so glamorous, but in a way that feels very innate and casual,” Hathaway says, “and that’s how the dress made me feel: very light and very glamorous.”
Today, Posen looks the part of senior management in a double-breasted houndstooth suit by Banana Republic (“It’s really important to live and breathe your products,” he says). But at 44, he still has the exuberant energy of a kid on Sunday morning. His curls are in a perpetual, endearing bedhead. He smiles big and often, with dimples punctuating his cheeks, and reacts to ideas for upcoming collections as if sampling new foods. When Posen likes something, such as a new print or a reusable bag, he declares it “yummy.” When he doesn’t, such as a certain shade of orange, he calls it “yucky.” A color called sulfur gives him “the heebie-jeebies,” as does wasteful packaging. When he talks about the construction of a garment, he will often remind everyone that he was “Lego kid,” meaning a child of the 1980s, and, like Oprah, he loves a full-circle moment.
Posen also loves to play. On a marble coffee table in the adjoining room is a stack of Gap fabrics—denim, khaki, jersey—which Posen hopes to drape on a mannequin today. But for now, he still has a bunch of meetings to get through. He has now rolled his swivel chair to the giant monitor, peering into the screen to count the cowls on a red sequin gown, which Jennifer Hudson has requested as part of her deal for appearing in an Old Navy campaign. The T-shirt dress, meanwhile, is for Demi Moore, who appeared in an iconic 1990 Gap ad. When Moore wears the dress that will be—that’s right—another full-circle moment. “She likes to hide a heel,” Posen tells his team. “Give her a little train, and we’ll chop it off if she wants.”
For skeptics wondering what Posen, the savant of ball gowns, is doing at a retailer that built its business on everyday basics, it’s interesting that the earliest fruits of his tenure have been custom eveningwear. Posen sees GapStudio almost like a couture house. Yes, it involves custom pieces, but the bigger idea is to drive people into the stores. “If Louis Vuitton can have ball gowns that they don’t produce on a red carpet in order to sell luggage,” he says, “why can’t Gap have a T-shirt gown on the red carpet? But we’ll actually produce it.” And at an accessible price point. Eight days after Hathaway wore her shirtdress, Gap made a version of it available for $158. It sold out within hours. “It was a real viral moment,” Posen says. “I can get you the stats.” (“He cannot,” a Gap representative tells me, explaining that the company does not divulge those numbers.)
According to Dickson, such moments helped remind people that Gap still exists. Since the company’s 1990s heyday, a combination of too many stores, too much merchandise, and a lack of cohesive vision had sent sales on a steady decline, and the company’s valuation from about $40 billion in 2000 to $8.41 billion in 2023, the year Dickson joined the company. He needed to capture attention quickly and improve morale. Posen’s creations for Hathaway, Erivo, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph at last year’s Met Gala did just that. “Those sparkles turned heads,” Dickson tells me, snapping his fingers. “The lights were now on at the Gap.” Though the cleanup began long before Posen’s arrival, Gap Inc. has now seen sales grow for four consecutive quarters, and its stock is up 16 percent.
Posen, for his part, saw himself in Gap’s plight. “I love sleeping beauties,” he says, adding, “America loves heralding and shooting down. And I’ve definitely been a dove, a pigeon, a unicorn, and a dragon. So for me it’s like, What an opportunity!”
Back in 2019, after Posen’s company closed, he found himself in a professional abyss. He wondered how he would support himself. Posen went to Los Angeles, flirting with the idea of working in Hollywood. He tried Paris, where he interviewed for jobs at French houses. Eventually, he returned to New York, supporting himself with private commissions including bridal dresses, a piece for Drake’s 2023 tour, and costumes for Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. He and Dickson connected in the fall of 2023. Dickson was previously the president of Mattel, where he shepherded the Barbie blockbuster. “I’ve been a Willy Wonka at Mattel,” Posen recalls Dickson saying, “and I need to find my Willy for Gap.”
The company’s San Francisco headquarters has thousands of employees. Since I am also a child of the ’80s, the offices reminded me of The Sims, with its busy collective of perpetually smiling people, a “Gapeteria,” and a chief of technology named Sven. Posen bounds about its 15 floors, darting between meetings. To bypass the elevator bays, he’ll often just take the stairs. “I would be terrified to see my steps,” he says. He has joked that the company should get him a fireman’s pole so he can scoot down to his office.
The company’s language of corporate acronyms are a challenge for Posen’s dyslexia. His calendar is filled with SLT (senior leadership team) and LRP (long-range planning) meetings and reviews of P2Ms (product to market). For the first time in history, the company is redesigning stores for its brands all at once, and Posen goes over playlists, floor plans, and window displays. The day I visit marks the reopening of a Gap store in New York’s Flatiron neighborhood, and Posen proudly tells me that the paint on the walls was purchased with his personal Farrow & Ball discount. When he visited the new Banana Republic flagship in San Francisco, he inquired why the decor included a bowl of green apples and had it swapped out for an asparagus fern.
In the afternoon we settle into Posen’s office, where he unlaces his boots. “The shoes are coming off,” he says. “You don’t care, right?” It makes sense that Posen, who is highly tactile, would need to design barefoot. By this point in our time together, he had insisted on fixing the collar of my shirt, tried on a woman’s blazer worn by Gap Inc.’s VP of store development (who tells me that Posen inspected the fabric of her pants the previous week), unbuckled his pants to check the weave of a Gap tag, snapped a leaf off a plant to add to a mood board for summer, and studied the brand labels on denim worn by three separate Gap employees.
Posen slips a pincushion onto his forearm. He takes the corner of a denim sheet, pins it onto a mannequin just below the ribs, and tells me how, two weeks after meeting with Dickson, he flew west to appear before the company’s board. Their questions were what one might expect: What happened to his company? After making his name in eveningwear, why did he want to make jeans and T-shirts? Did he understand the complexities of a $15 billion business?
Posen had once led the way for a generation of designers that emerged in post-9/11 New York. His first show, which took place weeks after the towers fell, was made possible in part because the city’s factories emptied out, allowing his designs to be made. What followed was 20 years of ups and downs as he struggled to keep his business afloat, ultimately succumbing to the same forces plaguing many midsize fashion brands: a flawed wholesale model, the excesses of runway collections, and a lack of solid financial partnership to guide him through it all. The house’s intellectual property (including Posen’s name) has since been sold off to a licensing firm.
And yet during that time, Posen had amassed an enormous amount of experience. It is worth listing for the sheer scope of it: he has collaborated with Target, MAC cosmetics, Magnum Ice Cream, David’s Bridal, two diamond companies, Kenmark Eyewear, Barbie, the Muppets, and brands in mainland China and South America; he’s also been the creative director of women’s wear at Brooks Brothers, designed uniforms for Delta Airlines and for the waiters at Carbone, created two diffusion lines, wrote a cookbook, and spent six years as a judge on Project Runway. “People might interpret all that as ego or attention-seeking, and in fact it was 95 percent survival mode,” Posen says, explaining that it was part of his extensive effort to keep his company going. “But it definitely prepared me.”
Among those whom Dickson called when considering Posen was Domenico De Sole, the chairman of Tom Ford International, who had underwritten, along with Ford, Posen’s second runway show in 2002. De Sole, who’d been a member of Gap’s board until 2017, thought Posen would be a great fit. “Zac is a very creative person,” De Sole told me, “but he’s also a thoughtful person. He understands marketing and business.”
In his office, Posen has now pinned the denim fabric around the hips, folding each corner like origami. He takes white poplin, which at this moment looks no more interesting than a bedsheet, drapes it over one shoulder, and rips it straight across, leaving a heap of discarded fabric on the carpeted floor.
What appealed to Posen about the job was the opportunity to be integrated into so many people’s lives. He was impressed to learn, for example, that Old Navy was the second largest apparel brand in the U.S., with almost $8.2 billion in sales and an exponential potential for growth. And he would now have the solid, experienced partners he’d always looked for. Earlier I watched him show summer sketches to Dickson and Mark Breitbard, Gap’s CEO. There was a chambray “Gaptan” (a Gap caftan), as well as pieces in knit pointelle, sheer mesh, and macramé. Dickson didn’t like the mesh, but Breitbard encouraged Posen not to self-edit, a rare thing for a designer to hear. “Sample, play,” Breitbard said. “Let’s try it.”
I wondered if Posen feels a new kind of freedom with the resources of a major company behind him. “I mean, this is the big leagues,” he says, but he pushes back on the idea that he’s under any less pressure. “It’s a public company, which is a whole different level of intensity. That means you’re in touch with the market, the weather, the world beyond.” He means literally: the weather. On one of his first days on the job, Posen found himself in the boardroom looking at global weather patterns and how they might affect the price of linen in two years.
Dickson told me that Gap has different challenges than a brand like Barbie. “Barbie had haters,” he said, “so you had people who actually didn’t like you. Here, you have people who like you, but just weren’t engaged anymore.” Meanwhile, its role in the market has been encroached upon not just by fast-fashion giants like Uniqlo and H&M but even by luxury brands such as The Row, which looked more Gap than Gap itself when it presented baggy jeans, long-sleeve tees, and denim shirting in recent collections. Dickson’s hope is to reclaim some of that space. “How do you do it?” Posen asks, before answering his own question. “You go back to what you do best.”
Every detail of GapStudio, from the brand patches to be sewn into the garments (leather, embossed, “yum”) to the stock of a hangtag and cotton string (black, waxed) and shopping bags (heavyweight, debossed) has been the result of meticulous deliberation. At one point I watched Posen’s design director, Thomas Vasseur, whom Posen met at Azzedine Alaïa’s studio in 2000, confer with Posen about whether a gift box should come with a high-quality ribbon. “When you receive a product, of course I’m thinking waste,” Vasseur began, “but I’m also thinking…”
“…experience,” Posen said, finishing his thought. “Of course.” Later, Posen tells me, “It’s not luxury, but it’s, you know, yummy.”
As we’ve been talking, the sheets of fabric on the mannequin have transformed into a fishtail denim skirt and a raglan-seam top that recalled the ’90s. Posen thought he might send a photo of it to Uma Thurman, a close friend, or maybe it would become part of a future collection. “And that’s a really great way of creating, right?” he says. “That just became something very hands-on and artisanal. Our customers deserve that experience. It shouldn’t be price prohibitive—I just don’t believe in that.”
In the early evening, we leave the office and head to Posen’s home in Telegraph Hill, a northeast corner of the city known for the wild parrots that live in its trees. We drive past Chinatown, where chef Kathy Fang, daughter of the legendary House of Nanking founders, has become Posen's food guide, and Vacation, a vintage store where Posen finds inspiration in Gap designs from prior decades. (When I stopped by the previous day, the owner, Kristin Klein, told me she was saving all vintage Gap and Banana Republic pieces for Posen. “He gets first dibs,” she said.)
“This is the hill that keeps my ass up,” Posen says as we turn onto a steep road leading to his home. At the door we are greeted by Posen’s fiancé, Harrison Ball, a former New York City Ballet dancer.
“How do you do it?” Posen asks, about the task ahead of him, before answering his own question. “You go back to what you do best”
When Posen got the job, the couple had one week to find a place to live. Ball found their home on Zillow. A creaky four-story rental with steep stairs and clear views of the bay, it was built in 1852 by a ship captain. They’ve been working with designer Ken Fulk to make it theirs, updating an upstairs sitting room with red velvet Banana Republic sofas and a painting by Posen’s father. The couple’s dogs, Tsuki and Bizet, circle underfoot as Posen slumps in Ball’s arms in the kitchen. “What a week,” he says.
While Posen walks the dogs, Ball tells me how they met. They first saw each other in 2019 at Lincoln Center when Posen designed costumes for the ballet. Ball had just been hit by a car, so he wasn’t dancing, and Posen’s company was in its final days. (“He was masking a lot of pain,” Ball says.) A few months later, Ball was performing as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake. He asked a mutual friend to invite Posen to rehearsals. Ball imagined wooing Posen, but instead Posen came onstage afterward and gave Ball a correction. “Granted, I later saw a tape of that performance, and he was right,” Ball says.
As the pandemic hit the city, Ball fled to an island in the Bahamas where his father has a home. Posen holed up in Bridgehampton with the Schnabels, the family of his close childhood friend Lola. Ball and Posen began exchanging messages. But then the cell tower on the island was struck by lightning, wiping out the internet. Months went by without the two communicating.
In the fall of 2020, with pandemic restrictions easing, Ball and Posen met for coffee back in New York. Ball had planned to visit for three days and ended up staying a month. During a day trip to Woodstock, Ball asked Posen what he was looking for. Posen said he wanted to have a family. Ball was 27 then. He had been dancing since the age of four and was experiencing freedom for the first time. He encouraged Posen to do the same—to go and live and date people.
They didn’t see each other again until early the next year. When Ball returned to New York, Posen sent a car to pick him up from the airport. But Ball panicked. He asked the driver to turn around, and flew to North Carolina instead to see family. “I could feel that something was about to change in my life,” Ball tells me. A week later Posen cleared out two closets and Ball moved in. A year later, in 2022, they got engaged. They had gone to Omen in SoHo for dinner and walked back uptown all the way to East 73rd Street. There had been a shooting on the subway that day, and there was an eerie energy in the city. At home, Ball turned on NY1 and lay on the couch when Posen proposed, handing him a custom ring by Taffin.
That same year, Ball was promoted to principal dancer. Posen came to every show. Ball was dancing the role of the Poet in La Sonnambula when he decided he wanted to retire. A sesamoid bone in his foot was crushed, and arthritis was tormenting his body. He and Posen began to spend more time with Posen’s family in rural Pennsylvania. “And then his mother got diagnosed with cancer, stage IV,” Ball says.
When Posen returns from his walk, he seems nervous. “Everyone gets really scared when I talk, because I really talk,” Ball says.
As we walk to dinner, Posen picks up the story. When Ball told Posen to go and live, he went to LA, where he stayed with Alice + Olivia founder Stacey Bendet Eisner and her husband, Eric, at the sprawling Malibu estate owned by Eric’s father, Michael Eisner. “I was like Maria von Trapp,” Posen says.
He developed scripts for several TV networks, including one about a fashion designer, and thought about making a career pivot toward directing and producing. But then the new year came, his mother became ill, and he kept thinking about Ball. “It was time to go back to New York,” he says.
Shortly after getting together, Ball and Posen rented a car and drove across the country, staying at Best Westerns and Hampton Inns along the way. As we sit down to dinner at an upscale Italian restaurant in Jackson Square, I’m having trouble picturing Posen at a Best Western. “Really?” he says. Posen reminds me that he has a grounded side: He likes to garden, cook. “I have a polarity of mister tuxedo, which is fine,” he says, “but I’m actually happiest barefoot digging in the ground. And in jeans.”
“Listen, his parents are normal,” Ball adds. “He grew up going to Q-Mart in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.” Ball traces Posen’s more glamorous turn to his having attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, and having a friend circle that included Schnabel and Claire Danes. “When you’re a teenager and you happen to find that door, you want to know what’s in that room,” Ball explains.
Though Posen grew up in SoHo, the son of an artist and a lawyer, he’s quick to say that there was no trust fund. He didn’t exactly plan on becoming the ball gown guy. It’s true that while at Central Saint Martins he was assigned a T-shirt project and made a dress instead—“My own kind of reverse punk-ism,” he says—but he’d also made plenty of distressed T-shirts and deconstructed jeans. Gowns were ultimately a strategic decision. Fast fashion was coming in to take on sportswear and accessible luxury. Eveningwear made sense. “There was an opportunity to really own it,” he says.
The previous night, Ball had christened a new TV room by watching Posen on Project Runway for the first time. “People may look at that and think he sold out for TV,” Ball says, and turns to Posen. “But you were just trying to help your company survive.”
Ball is fiercely protective of Posen, who likens himself to a child star: raised in the traditional fashion system, listening to those he thought he could trust, and losing his way in the process. “You were a kid,” says Ball, who moved to New York as a teen. “The fact that Zac survived as long as he did is amazing, and he came out of it not a drug addict, not an alcoholic; he’s not a loose cannon.” Dickson told me that this was part of Posen’s appeal: That he had known and understood failure. Ball likened it to a pilot in the Bahamas who once crashed a puddle jumper into the ocean. Nobody would fly with him. “But my dad was like, That’s exactly who I want to fly with because he crashed and survived,” Ball says.
Posen’s mother, Susan, played a big role in Posen’s decision to take the job. Last Christmas Eve, Posen was with her in the hospital, negotiating with Dickson by phone. She was asking Posen the terms of his contract just before her vitals crashed and she briefly lost consciousness. Susan had been the CEO of her son’s company until 2010; what ultimately transpired weighed heavily on her. Posen hoped that by landing at a major American brand, he would alleviate some of her worries. “I really needed her to feel that I was okay,” Posen says. (Susan continues to undergo treatment.)
Ball believes that Posen ultimately ended up with the perfect job for him. He is now gaining more business experience than he ever would strictly as a designer—Gap Inc.’s annual sales are in the realm of Chanel’s—and Posen has some big ideas. Could Gap, which was founded in 1969 as a records and jeans shop, have a record label? Could Banana Republic become a hospitality brand, with its own line of hotels? This reminded me of something Jenna Lyons, the former president of J.Crew, had told me when discussing Posen’s new position. “I would have had so much baggage,” said Lyons, “but he doesn’t have that same notion of what you can and cannot do, or what will and will not work.”
At dinner, Posen is monitoring a text thread with his SLT that is still buzzing at 8 p.m. Everyone is excited about the new Flatiron store, where sales are up 60 percent. In general, the news has been good: Third quarter sales at the company are up 2 percent, which is enough for Dickson, who’s focused on steady, incremental growth. Still, the stakes are high, both for Gap’s legacy and for Posen’s career. But Posen has more perspective now. “I still care deeply, but I won’t do high drama,” he says. “It’s exhausting and it’s silly.” He’s focused on the work, and on passing the lessons he’s learned on to the next generation of designers, hoping to establish a mentorship program at the company. The reality is that he’s part of something larger now that isn’t really about Posen at all. “It was there before me, and it will be there after,” he says.
It sounded like the great humbling of Zac Posen. “When you’ve had your name taken from you, it’s pretty humbling,” he says. Plus, his priorities have expanded. He and Ball would like to have children—they’ve agreed on two—and they’re still getting to know their new city. Back in New York their evenings were spent at the ballet, the philharmonic, the opera. But here, out West, Ball will often pick up Posen from work with their dogs in tow, and they’ll drive to Muir Beach, or Petaluma, or Point Reyes, where they’ll shuck oysters on the beach, make a bonfire, and jump into the freezing cold water. Posen seems introspective when he tells me, “You’re on this planet for a real short amount of time. You’re probably not going to be remembered, sorry to say. Life kind of recycles itself. We’re not that different from a leaf, disintegrating in all its humility. So you might as well try during that time to give back, ignite imagination, build confidence, affect somebody’s life in some capacity.”
In this story: hair, Edward Lampley; makeup, James Kaliardos; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailor, Jacqui Bennett at Carol Ai Studio Tailors; produced by AL Studio; production coordination by Boom Productions inc; set design, Mary Howard.
Special Thanks to Hook Studios and Hook Props