Zac Poses On Launching Gap Studio, Gap’s Luxe Under-$300 Collection

In the little over a year since his February 2024 appointment as Creative Director at Gap Inc., Zac Posen has transformed an American heritage brand, most associated with carefully folded khakis and ‘90s mall culture, into a red carpet juggernaut and fashion forerunner. But that wasn’t the goal, per se. Like most great ideas, GapStudio came from a place of why not?

“There was no plan for this,” Posen tells me over an iced tea on the 15th floor of the brand’s downtown office space. Instead, Posen says he was hired as a sort of “Willy Wonka” for the company—someone to push creativity from within, spearheading innovation and experimenting with what it means to wear Gap. 

Gap President and CEO Richard Dickson, the man behind Barbie’s cultural resurgence at Mattel, wanted to see what would happen when you give a creative force the keys to the chocolate factory. And though Posen, who works across Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Gap, says he spent his first few months getting to know the ins and outs of the business, he also found time to play. 

Now, those months of hard work and play are coming to fruition: GapStudio, a new Posen-designed collection within a collection for Gap, launches April 3, delivering atelier craftsmanship at an under-$300 price point.

Posen says, “We had this amazing moment where we had an opportunity to attend the Met Gala, and [wondered], should Gap be represented there?” The answer, of course, was why not? But making it happen required the best in the biz. So, Posen “assembled a team of artisans and amazing craftspeople” to build a custom piece for Da’Vine Joy Randolph.

The resulting gown, a multi-layered, corseted confection made from Gap denim, landed the brand on best-dressed roundups and evening-wear mood boards across the industry. Shortly thereafter, the designer got a call from celebrity stylist Erin Walsh, asking if he’d consider creating a custom Gap shirtdress for her client, Anne Hathaway. “Literally, the day after the Met, I started cutting up our white shirt, draping and rebuilding it,” he remembers. “And within two weeks, we were fitting it on her, and she was wearing it.” 

To say the look went viral is an understatement. Everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted a piece of Hathaway’s off-the-shoulder poplin dress. Again, Posen and his team asked, why not? and decided to produce the piece en masse. “We got it to market really quickly, and it sold out within hours,” he says, launching the piece online last summer and creating a Gap by Zac Posen brand signature. 

The success of Hathaway’s creation was the moment the GapStudio team realized “there’s something to this,” says Posen. Other celebrity dressing moments followed: from Demi Moore in a Gap-designed motorcycle jacket on her press tour for The Substance to Timothée Chalamet at an Oscars dinner in custom Bob Dylan-inspired Gap duds. All this proof of Gap’s red carpet success begged yet another question: Why not release a full GapStudio collection? 

That’s precisely what’s next in store. Designed by the same team that cut Randolph’s bustier and draped Hathaway’s poplin, GapStudio Collection 01 harnesses the attention to detail and meticulous construction of the brand’s red carpet atelier for the Gap customer. There’s an Anne-inspired shirtdress, this time in khaki and polka dots for summer, and a fitted denim midi that evokes the hourglass silhouette of their Met Gala creation. (Both of which, Posen is betting, will sell out.)

But when the designer takes me on a tour of the physical Gap Studio in New York, it’s not the assortment’s commercial viability that’s most striking. In person, it is the carefully considered fit, stellar tailoring, and thoughtful details that stand out. For example, GapStudio’s denim bralette features artful seams and a scalloped edge that’s easy to miss just looking at a linesheet. The pleated minis are both substantial and soft with a weight and stretch that would make you think they’re worth 3x the under-$300 price point. And the deceptively simple slip dresses aren’t just cut on the bias, they’re stitched together from multiple pieces of fabric, creating an ultra-flattering hourglass that’s impossible to find these days (at a mall or otherwise), despite the trend’s popularity.

These little flourishes are all part of the Posen charm—after all, the designer became a household name for his custom evening wear—and the Posen process. In a spare moment on our walkthrough, the designer drifted over to a colleague draping fabric on a mannequin at his cutting station, touching and spinning the nascent shirt design to find the absolute best possible way to construct it. He can’t help but create with intention.

“I have a lot of years of experience in production, within my own brand and within secondary brands, working for Brooks Brothers,” explains Posen of how he’s able to deliver hand-crafted quality at the Gap. “I kind of know where things can be pushed.” He’s also pushing on the trend front at Gap, offering more youthful pieces with GapStudio than what you’d typically find at the store.

Hemlines are shorter (see the bloomer-inspired bubble skirts with built-in shorts) and crops are tighter. Collection 01 was concocted as a “dream wardrobe” for today’s modern shopper, who likes to mix and match, who dresses high and low. “Mall culture’s back. Online shopping is back. And, I know how the girlies and the mamas and the sisters shop today. Like, we’re cross-shopping,” Posen says, citing his sisters, friends, and mom as inspiration. “It’s that simplification of form, purpose, and meaning: The perfect khaki jacket, an amazing trench coat, the great-fitting body-con denim dress, white shirting,” he adds.

These are the new icons Posen has lifted from the Gap paintbox, elevating and updating as he goes. This is not your average Gap trench coat (or shirt, or body-con dress), though. “I have to give product integrity. It’s just in me,” he says. Even the brand’s belt assortment (if you could call it that) of corset waists is intentional in its form and function. “It was like carving an instrument, building a violin and shape,” he says of the design process. “[It had to have] the right arch, the right bottom shape and enough curvature.”

This is not to say that brand heritage isn’t present in GapStudio. The company’s considerable archive is a constant source of inspiration for the designer, and you can trace its influence in big ways (like the collection’s cozy cropped sweatshirts) and small. Posen picks up “little finishing techniques” from the Gap garments of decades past—from “how rivets are done” to buttons and stitching—and even taps into the creative legacy of Gap’s most memorable campaigns in his work.

“I love working with our photo archive,” says Posen, citing “all the great Gap portraits and the amazing prints” as a constant source of inspiration. In fact, creating an exhibit of the Gap photo archive is on his “career bucket list.” But for now, he’s content with creating his own glittering images, tapping the next generation of creatives, icons, and supermodels for the GapStudio’s inaugural campaign.

Photographed by modern legend Mario Sorrenti and starring Alex Consani, Imaan Hammam, and Anok Yai—three models who make up the new guard of the runway and also happen to be friends IRL—the GapStudio campaign toes the line of past and present. “I have been thinking a lot about what Gap meant for me as a child,” explains Posen. “It was this idea of new retail modernity, and I think it was way ahead of its time, and thinking about, what does that mean today?”

“As a New Yorker, I’ve always seen Gap as a classic American brand and a part of my youth,” says Sorrenti of the project. “The brand has embodied a sense of effortless style, and I’m honored to contribute to its ongoing story.” Alastair McKimm, a frequent Posen collaborator, also helped bring the collection to life, taking a fresh and loose approach to styling at GapStudio.

That sense of play, evolution, and why not? is ultimately what excites Posen most about his work at GapStudio. “You should be able to dump it in a pile and then be able to remake many outfits,” he says of the new collection. For him, it’s about giving customers the freedom to express their style with GapStudio, not dictating terms or gatekeeping fashion.

“What’s most fun is to discover it on the street—how people interpret it, how people love it,” says Posen. “Tag me, show me! I want to see your best interpretations. Show me your five ways to wear it.”