How Zac Posen Went from Making Ball Gowns to Remaking the Gap

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.”