How Zac Posen Went from Making Ball Gowns to Remaking the Gap
Creativity in the Posen household was a religion, even if it was not always communal. The front half of the family loft was Stephen’s studio, which Posen had learned to consider “a sacred space, not to be disturbed.” Posen, his mother, and his older sister, Alexandra, entered the apartment through a side entrance, and for a time Stephen kept a fortune cookie message pinned to the studio door that read, “An open door is not always an invitation to enter.” » Last spring, Posen took me to visit the loft. His parents weren’t there — they still own the property but live year-round on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — so we entered through the studio, which had high tin ceilings and smelled strongly of turpentine. “It’s still weird, after all these years, to get in his way,” Posen said.
Posen with his friend and longtime client Natalie Portman, in 2002.Photography by Jimi Celeste / PMC
What Posen saw of his father’s work had a formative effect. Stephen went through a phase of stretching textiles over cardboard boxes to create 3D shapes on giant canvases. “It was the first time I saw draping in action,” Posen told me. Father and son collected fabrics thrown into the street by local garment factories. At the age of four, Posen made a miniature dress, using wire and the cork from a champagne bottle as a base, and began outfitting a She-Ra doll with custom clothing. Susan, whose grandmother was a seamstress, taught him how to use a sewing machine when he was six. Alexandra remembers: “He was doing things all the time: drawing, sewing, sculpting, using foil, yarmulkes, leather cutouts, fabric scraps, whatever. »
In college, Posen experimented with his own personal style, wearing dandy ensembles consisting of capes and jodhpurs or old-fashioned sailor pants. In ninth grade, he enrolled at St. Ann’s, a private school in Brooklyn known for attracting the children of the creative elite. He showed up on the first day dressed like Charlie Chaplin and caught the attention of Lola Schnabel, daughter of artist Julian Schnabel and designer Jacqueline Beaurang. Lola invited him to her mother’s West Village brownstone, and the two became inseparable. She recalls: “I’ve been surrounded by interesting gay people my whole life and I told him straight away that I knew he was gay and that was wonderful. » (This was nothing new for Posen: he had been out the previous summer, at a theater camp.)
Posen’s own parents were, as he put it, “part of no scene,” but through Lola he was introduced to the world of inner-city movers and shakers. THE Vogue Editor Grace Coddington was a neighbor of Beaurang and the artist René Ricard, who had been a regular at Andy Warhol’s factory, was her regular guest. Posen began going out to nightclubs and wearing increasingly eccentric outfits that he described as “vampiric-tribal-dandy-punk-romantic DIY”: lime green platform shoes, satin ruffs, a homemade faux raccoon coat, a vintage muff. (“The sleeve was a little too much,” his father told me.) During a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute when he was sixteen, Posen chatted with Richard Martin, then the institute’s chief curator. Martin offers him an internship. “I remember the first time I saw Madeleine Vionnet up close,” Posen said, referring to the French designer who popularized the bias-cut dress. “I laid down right under it and it totally changed my life.” Posen began making clothes for his girlfriends, including what he called “morning dresses,” sewn in a single day so the recipient could wear them that evening. Writer and director Lena Dunham was a St. Ann student five years below Posen, and for a time Posen worked as her babysitter. She recalled him as “our high school fashion designer. He was doing exactly what he’s doing now for the Met Gala, except for all the cool girls going to prom.” He attended the graduation dressed as the pope.
“Whoa, looks like I picked the wrong day to wear a turkey for a hat and a piece of bacon for a tie.”
Cartoon by Edward Steed
In 1999, Posen was admitted to the prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school in London. There he experimented with more avant-garde creations, notably transparent jumpsuits in parachute fabric. One of her pieces, an elaborate leather corset dress, was selected from a student showcase to become part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s permanent collection. But Posen’s biggest break was a combination of serendipity and many social connections. One day during her first year in London, when Lola Schnabel was living with him, she was wearing a bias-cut cocktail dress that he had made, and her friend Naomi Campbell, the model, asked where she could get one. Campbell quickly became one of the first devoted customers. When Posen returned to New York at Christmas, he brought a pink flamenco-style cocktail dress he had made as a sample for Campbell and lent it to his St. Ann friend, Paz de la Huerta, daughter of Spanish nobility and aspiring independent actress, to wear to a Christmas party at the house of another friend, future “Girls” star Jemima Kirke. At the party, de la Huerta danced while holding up the dress’s frilly skirt like a matador’s cape. Journalist Daisy Garnett, who was there, was so captivated that she wrote an article for the Times in which she deemed Posen’s creation “the best dress in the world.”
