Seven years after closing his label, the designer has turned Gap into fashion’s most irresistible comeback story via red-carpet spectacle, pitch-perfect nostalgia, and an instinct for viral moments
Photography by RAINER HOSCH
Styling by MASHA MANDZUKA
Words by DAVID NASH
Fashion may be fleeting, but reinvention springs eternal for an industry predicated on change. Just ask designer Zac Posen, who in 2019 shuttered his namesake brand — after two decades dressing A-listers and royalty like Rihanna, Demi Moore, Natalie Portman, and Princess Eugenie — only to land one of the biggest jobs in American fashion five years later. That move has made us fall in love with Gap all over again.
“I really appreciate the history in San Francisco — it’s surrounded by such outrageous beauty.”
Gap’s collaborations and viral moments are growing by the minute. This spring, a sold-out Victoria Beckham x Gap collection distilled her minimal signatures and Gap’s quintessential and accessible staples, striking a chord with both style-conscious younger shoppers and loyal Gap traditionalists. Gap’s Hoodie House at Coachella was a hit because it sold the brand’s signature item as a customizable wear-now souvenir ideal for cool desert nights. But Posen’s greatest achievement has arguably been getting his GapStudio line onto the red carpet. At this year’s Met Gala, Kendall Jenner wore a dress inspired by the sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace. It featured a leather bodice and drapery, not to mention detachable wings so big that they didn’t fit on the carpet — spot-on for the gala’s dress code, “Fashion is Art.”
Two decades after Posen’s first trunk show for Neiman Marcus, he has made San Francisco his second home. Sitting in his corner office at the company’s Folsom Street headquarters, he kicks off his textured Timberland boots, flops down on a modular dark blue chenille sofa, and reclines while the concrete-and-glass jungle of skyscrapers appears through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him.
“I remember, after my trunk show on my first trip here, Vanessa Getty and Ken Fulk took me to Bix for dinner,” the 45-year-old designer says, recalling the ambiance of the 1930s-style supper club and the warm welcome he received in the early 2000s. “It has taken almost two years of being here — 20-plus years later — to rediscover it. But I was just there again, and it was totally a full-circle moment.”
“So much about the Gap Inc. brands have unveiled themselves to me through a deeper understanding of San Francisco.”
Posen’s job title is a mouthful. He’s the creative director at Gap Inc., the San Francisco–based clothing company founded by Donald and Doris Fisher in 1969, and the chief creative officer at Old Navy. Gap Inc. had net sales of $15 billion in 2025, so Posen’s job is one of the biggest in U.S. fashion. And his arrival has been instrumental in the 57-year-old retailer’s renaissance.
“I represent the creative community and am a creative partner to Richard Dickson, the CEO,” Posen says. “Often, it’s meetings prior to final reviews with Richard and giving guidance. A lot of times it’s letting creatives within teams evolve and build their work — you’re a steward, in a sense.”
In its heyday from the 1990s to the early 2000s, under the direction of CEO Mickey Drexler, the brand elevated itself with video campaigns (Madonna and Missy Elliot collaborated on a remix of “Get Into the Groove,” and Lenny Kravitz and Sarah Jessica Parker mashed up “Are You Gonna Go My Way” and “Lady”). Print ads featuring supermodels, actors, and other boldface names — including Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Spike Lee, Whoopi Goldberg, John Malkovich, and Joan Didion — were shot by Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, and Steven Meisel. The clothing itself was of the moment and in demand. Fast-forward almost 30 years — through creative direction changes, financial crises, and a pandemic — and Gap as we romanticized it has returned.
“It has been an amazing transformation over the past two years, and it’s really just beginning,” Posen says. “It’s a reestablishment, I would say, and a restatement of our value-style proposition that we deliver. And we’ve had amazing category growth over the past two years that’s just kind of extraordinary.”
Asked about the rebirth of a cultural era that produced Friends, grunge music, and the dotcom boom, Posen says Gap’s resurgence is “kismet.” He adds, “Our brands are taking center stage; they feel really attuned right now to culture.” I mention Ryan Murphy’s latest series for FX, Love Story (about the relationship of John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy), knowing Posen designed the costumes for Murphy’s show Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. “I believe over the past two years, Mr. Murphy has been watching closely,” Posen says. “He was one of the first people [to know] when I got this job because we were doing the press on the costumes for Feud. And that kind of nostalgia, which is a very American thing, I think feels more attuned [to this moment] than high fashion.”
Recent Gap campaigns have given us hits of nostalgia, like “Get Loose” in Fall 2024, featuring Troye Sivan (focused on the revival of ’90s-era baggy denim); the viral “Better in Denim” Fall 2025 campaign, with the group KATSEYE dancing in low-rise denim to a version of Kelis’ 2003 hit “Milkshake”; and “Sweats Like This” in Spring 2026, with Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko. But GapStudio truly bolstered the brand’s profile. “It wasn’t in the master plan,” Posen says about setting up an internal creative studio that released its first collection for Spring 2025 (some of its pieces are on these pages). In 2024, he dressed Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph in a draped denim gown for the Met Gala and crafted a white corseted shirtdress for Anne Hathaway to wear to a Bulgari event in Rome. After that, the die was cast: Gap released a version of Hathaway’s dress for $158, and it flew off the racks. “It was crazy. It sold out like hotcakes within minutes,” he says. “That led to Richard asking, ‘What if we built a studio for ideas [and] capsule collections?’ ”
With GapStudio, which is based in New York, Posen has been able to strike a balance between the boardroom and creativity. A few pieces sold in a flash: a seamed denim midi dress and a denim cocoon coat from a campaign starring mother-daughter duo Gwyneth Paltrow and Apple Martin (shot by Mario Sorrenti), as well as a version of the custom black duchess satin Icon jacket and jean ensemble worn by Timothée Chalamet to last year’s Academy Awards nominees luncheon. “It’s allowed me to keep my hands in clay, and that’s something really important to me as a creator,” he says, noting that he’s involved in all the brands: Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Athleta. “I’m not designing those collections. I wear different hats in many ways [and] get into the creativity of business building and strategy. But to be a hands-on creator, that’s as important to me as eating and sleeping.”
A workday in San Francisco might start at home around 6:15 a.m. “I Zoom with my trainer in New York, because I like to create consistency there. I let my dogs out and make my green tea — I switched to tea while working here; before I was drinking too much coffee. Then I get to the office for my first meeting around 8. From there, I describe it as buckling up into a roller-coaster seat,” he says with a laugh. “I basically have back-to-back meetings until 6 p.m., on an average day, that can include long-range planning sessions in the boardroom, seasonal ready-to-market concepting, casting, store planning, real estate, and visual merchandising meetings.” As for regular travel between coasts: “There’s no direct cadence; it’s kind of up to where I’m needed and where I have meetings.” Occasionally, the GapStudio team will come here, but the atelier — a codesigner, a collection designer, a pattern maker, two sewers, a few additional staff, and freelance designers — is squarely set in New York.
“I wear different hats, but to be a hands-on creator, that’s as important as eating and sleeping.”
“A lot of the pieces you saw in New York were draped in San Francisco, and there’s a back-and-forth flow to that,” he says of my visit to Gap’s office in Tribeca. “But that’s really built out as the hub for experimentation, for new ideas, and for developing cultural moments.”
In his West Coast life outside the office, Posen proves to be equally enthusiastic. “I really appreciate the history in San Francisco — it’s surrounded by such outrageous beauty,” he says. “I don’t know any other place in the world that has a more diverse range of nature right outside it.” In town, he and his fiancé, Harrison Ball, found a comfortable perch in North Beach. “It’s one of the oldest houses in San Francisco — it’s a little redwood jewel box with a lot of history [and] a small backyard with a garden.” Nestled on a quiet block, the place offers anonymity and a respite from his busy work schedule.
In fact, you’re more likely to see the pair picking over produce at a farm stand than eating at one of the city’s most popular restaurants. “Obviously, I’m a big foodie,” says the author of Cooking with Zac: Recipes from Rustic to Refined (Rodale Books), published in 2017. “Sadly, my favorite [dining] spot is my own kitchen. We go to our local farmers market, and on weekends we’ll sometimes go to the Petaluma Market. Pride in produce is something I can really appreciate and geek out on.” Almost immediately after he arrived, chef and restaurateur Kathy Fang gave him an insider’s tour of where to shop and what to shop for. “I have a text chain with her about what’s in season, and the streets in Chinatown and what to get there, and that’s just really cool,” he says.
On days off work, Posen’s penchant for plant life can keep him feeling just as fulfilled as produce markets. “I love plants and I do spend a lot of time — when I get free time — at garden centers,” he says, citing Heron’s Head Nursery and Flora Grubb in San Francisco, and Cottage Gardens in Petaluma, as a few of his favorites. “I have beautiful palms in my teeny little backyard from Flora Grubb that I just adore — it’s like Jurassic Park meets an English garden.”
Sometimes his personal and work lives converge. The San Francisco Ballet offers an indoor outlet for the couple (Ball is a choreographer, an actor, and a former principal dancer at New York City Ballet). “What a beautiful theater — and to be able to spend time doing new costumes for it,” Posen says about designing the ensembles, inspired by Bay Area sunsets, for Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, which premiered in February 2025. “It was an incredible experience working with both the costume shop and the company.” His civic mindset and cultural proclivities also landed him on San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s board of trustees in 2025. “It’s a world-class collection, and they’re putting on incredible exhibitions,” he says. “My father is a painter, so I grew up in the art world and thought it would be interesting to have that kind of fresh perspective. And, obviously, there’s the connection with the Fisher Collection [at SFMOMA].” (Posen grew up in SoHo in New York City, attended Parsons School of Design there, and then went to Central Saint Martins in London before staging his first runway show at age 21.)
In mid-conversation, he runs his hands through his mop of curly black hair and announces (for the second time) that he needs a haircut: “It’s a mess; it’s way too long — I need someone who deals with curls.” He’s short on time and leaving in two days for L.A., where two custom GapStudio looks are set to hit the Academy Awards red carpet less than a week later: a corseted cobalt blue gown for actor Barbie Ferreira and a sleek black tailcoat suit for actor Milo Manheim. Luckily, the L.A.-based stylist for our shoot earlier in the day, Masha Mandzuka (with whom he shares Demi Moore as a mutual friend), offers up the name of a trusted coiffeur there. His usual hairstylist is in Manhattan, so crisis averted.
At the end of our time together, I ask Posen to summarize his experience over the past two years. “So much about the Gap Inc. brands have unveiled themselves to me through a deeper understanding of San Francisco — even just looking at the Gap brand itself and its evolution over time, its level of modernity or modularity, and what was happening in design and technology in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says. “And it just all starts to click. There’s something really cool about continually perfecting a T-shirt, continually perfecting classics, tweaking them ever so slightly and evolving that story — I just felt like this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I feel very lucky to be here.”
Feature image: Zac Posen flanked by models wearing GapStudio creations, including a version of the poplin white shirtdress designed for Anne Hathaway in 2024, a poplin bodysuit and high-rise seamed denim maxi skirt from the Fall 2025 collection, and a version of the black cropped satin Icon jacket and matching pants worn by Timothée Chalamet to last year’s Academy Awards nominees luncheon.
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2026 issue of C Magazine.
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