When Zac Posen was a 20-year-old fashion wunderkind, he showed his first capsule of designs a month after 9/11. His debut runway show followed in February 2002. “I had a moment where it was, ‘What am I doing making dresses and trench coats?,” Posen says, “‘What is this about?’”
He had a similar feeling when, after arriving at Gap Inc.—the parent company of Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy as its executive vice president and creative director—its CEO Richard Dickson asked him if he’d considered collaborations as part of his creative strategy. “There’s a lot of brands that do collabs,” Posen says, in what feels like an understatement these days. He was interested in the idea, but wanted whatever he did for Old Navy to have some sense of gravitas.
Fashion collaborations have come a long way since Marc Jacobs worked with artists Stephen Sprouse and Takashi Murakami at Louis Vuitton in the early aughts, and since Karl Lagerfeld dared to partner up with H&M in 2004. These days, they’ve gone from novelty to commonplace, and the format du jour is for independent designers to partner up with apparel behemoths. This year alone we’ve seen partnerships between Zara and Willy Chavarria, Eckhaus Latta with both J.Crew and Mango, and Victoria Beckham and Gap, with more coming.
Now that Posen is all grown up, his role leading some of America’s most beloved and well-known fashion brands comes with a sense of duty. “[It’s] a responsibility for creativity and expression, and to highlight great talents,” he says. He’s decided to use the massive platform that is Old Navy to uplift his colleagues at home. “When I think of American designers, I think of a palette in a sense of the cross of ages, of different backgrounds,” he says. “I’ve watched the American fashion industry evolve and change and be challenged time and time again, and be incredibly resilient.”
For fall, after working with Anna Sui, a bona fide New York fashion legend, and Christopher John Rogers, a new-gen star, Posen looked to his own generation: Joseph Altuzarra, who just so happened to show one of the best collections at New York Fashion Week.
Neither remembers quite how they met—Posen remarks the New York industry is small, which is fair—but Altuzarra recalls them bonding over working closely with their respective mothers to establish their businesses early on. “We had a short but meaningful conversation that I always remember,” Altuzarra says. When he learned that Posen was headed to Gap Inc., he mentioned the idea of working together when they ran into each other at an event. “And that snippet of a conversation became this collaboration,” Altuzarra says.
