From couture royalty to king of the high street

Zac Posen on transforming Gap, his new muse, Lila Moss, and why 1990s London was the place to be. Just don’t mention fast fashion...

- BY JOE BROMLEY

Making a pair of jeans is as artisanal as making a gown,” says Zac Posen, the American fashion designer, in a vast Manhattan boardroom.

It might not have been a sentence the now 44-year-old would have uttered when he was stitching intricate leather gowns while studying womenswear at Central Saint Martins in 1999, nor in the years after, when his eponymous label boomed and he became one of America’s best-known figures in fashion thanks to his sculptural red carpet looks and penchant for draping.

However, the best thing US culture has brought to the world “is this idea of reinvention and self-invention and self-creation,” he continues. So when we speak, he is shamelessly enthusiastic about his current, rather grand, role: executive vice president and creative director at Gap Inc.

He has overseen its stable of brands — Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta — since last year. The new era was celebrated in this February's issue of US Vogue, which featured supermodels in his high street designs. “A dream come true, a career milestone, and an unbelievable ‘pinch me’ moment,” he wrote on Instagram. While not a surprise — Dame Anna Wintour, the magazine's editor-in-chief, has been instrumental in the creation of brand Posen — some questioned the ethics of promoting clothes deemed to be fast fashion.

“It’s not fast fashion — it’s being able to produce with incredible partners at a very high quality,” Posen says. “We are able to create at the speed of culture. That’s how we can have Timothée Chalamet wearing an incredible piece and then be able to deliver that to the customer in a very short amount of time.”