Under fashion designer and comeback kid Zac Posen, Gap goes for a glow-up
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The American fashion designer was appointed chief creative officer of Old Navy in February.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
SAN FRANCISCO – At the start of New York Fashion Week on Sept 6, more than 1,000 designers, models, factory workers, editors, retailers and influencers marched to Bryant Park to encourage voter registration ahead of the US presidential election.
Most of them wore the same thing: a white T-shirt (or T-shirt dress) with black letters that spelt out the doodled slogan “Fashion For Our Future”.
The designer: Zac Posen, for Old Navy.
In other words, what was essentially a giant Old Navy show was one of the first big events of New York Fashion Week.
“Crazy, right?” Posen, 43, said a few weeks earlier. The American fashion designer 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 hotshot 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 one-time avatar of cool Americana that had turned khakis and a white T-shirt into a billion-dollar behemoth.
Designers Thom Browne, Steven Kolb, Tory Burch, Michael Kors and Zac Posen march up Broadway at Fashion For Our Future March in New York City on Sept 6.
PHOTO: AFP
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 chief executives had promised turnarounds, only to see sales slow and the stock fall ever further. An ill-fated deal in 2020 with American rapper-designer Kanye West left the company with egg on its face.
The group is still big – sales for 2023 were US$14.9 billion (S$19.4 billion) – but it had become “just product”, said Ms Anna Wintour, chief content officer of global mass media company Conde Nast. “It had the name, it had the recognition, but there was no sense of excitement.”
Then, in August 2023, Mr 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.
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 can be a disaster.
Posen is all in. He has traded his suits and tuxedos for jeans.
(From left) Old Navy CCO Zac Posen, Gap CEO Richard Dickson and Old Navy CMO Behnaz Ghahramani at Webster Hall in New York City on Sept 9,.
PHOTO: AFP
He 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; then 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, Mr Ronald Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies, 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-19 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.
“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 reality designing series Project Runway, from 2013 to 2017.
Even if, he said, Gap was not on his radar “at all”. Even if he remembered thinking on his first day, “What am I doing here?”
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 in 2025.
In the meantime, along with outfitting the fashion week march, Old Navy also threw 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 – do not just say “vote”.
They say, he noted, “we’re ready to be part of the conversation again”. NYTIMES
