From the Red Carpet to the Bottom Line
By JACOB BERNSTEIN
(nytimes)
This February, Zac Posen went to the Oscars. Though he had been in Los Angeles and gone to the parties surrounding the awards several times over the last decade, the designer had never attended the actual ceremony at the Kodak Theater.
Yet Mr. Posen decided not to make his way down the red carpet, where the paparazzi were lined up three-deep.
“I walked on the side part,” he said about a week ago, sitting in his studio on the edge of SoHo and TriBeCa. “I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to be promoting myself as a celebrity. I haven’t worked on a film project.”
Um, just who was this Zac Posen and where did the other one go?
As almost anyone in fashion can tell you, there was a time not so long ago when the idea of his avoiding cameras and flashing lights would have seemed absurd. He had come onto the scene at age 20, not even out of design school, and was known for wearing evening tails to his fashion shows and speaking a dialect of English that could best be described as Vreeland-ese.
Three years later, Mr. Posen won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s award for new talent. Top-tier actresses like Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Claire Danes and Ellen Barkin regularly appeared front row at his shows. Sean Combs, then still known as Puff Daddy, jumped on board the Posen bandwagon as his big investor.
And then things became complicated: Ron Burkle, the chairman of Yucaipa Companies, provided an infusion of money into Mr. Combs’s clothing empire, took a controlling interest and — as Mr. Posen later said — began to impose stricter control on the designer’s finances. A series of executives on the business side came and went. So did Mr. Posen’s mother, Susan, a former mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had been the company’s chief executive and worked with her son since the company’s inception until her resignation in 2010. (She remains on the board.) Shortly before his mother’s abrupt move, Mr. Posen told The New York Times that he was in “survival mode.”
In the fall of 2010, Mr. Posen took his fashion show from New York to Paris, only to find after two seasons that the city didn’t exactly embrace him. Editors at many of the fashion magazines bristled at what they perceived as grandiose behavior, in part because of the hallowed site he used for his Paris debut. “Posen did himself no favors by choosing as his venue the spectacular, 19th-century gilded ballroom of the Westin Hotel, formerly the InterContinental, and still synonymous with the couture shows of the late Yves Saint Laurent,” Women’s Wear Daily sniped. “This room, and this city, it must be said, expects to see better clothes than what Posen paraded.” (Reviewing the show for The International Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes wrote that it was “a collection that had a peppy glamour but seemed more of a pastiche than a seductive path to fashion’s new direction.”)
Mr. Posen’s reputation for overreaching didn’t appear to come out of thin air. In an early interview with The Times of London, he blanched at comparisons that had been drawn between him and Michael Kors. “No way,” Mr. Posen said. “I’ve been compared to Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano, and yes, those make me happy.”
But then, something interesting happened. After a lot of burned bridges, Mr. Posen came home to New York and found an industry that was largely willing to forgive and welcome him back.
Harvey Weinstein booked him as Mr. Kors’s replacement on the most recent season of “Project Runway.” (Mr. Posen is expected to begin filming his second season as a judge soon). “He’s handsome, loquacious, and on ‘Runway’ opinionated works,” Mr. Weinstein said. “He’s opinionated.”
A slew of big-name fashion plates began wearing his dresses again. One was Oprah Winfrey, who donned one of Mr. Posen’s fancy floor-length gowns for her appearance at the 2011 Oscars. Another was Michelle Obama, who chose a red knit Posen dress for one of her appearances during the recent inauguration. This past awards season, Amanda Seyfried, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close all wore his showstopping gowns on the red carpet. Meanwhile, the designer collaborated with his childhood friend Lena Dunham on her Golden Globes dress, which was inspired by John Singer Sargent’s famed “Madame X” painting.
“People wouldn’t expect me to care about things like fit, but when you’re a curvier woman, you especially notice it,” Ms. Dunham said, speaking by phone last week. “I felt very attended to. My mother said, ‘It’s my favorite thing you’ve ever worn.’ ”
And more recently, Mr. Posen, now 32, has been seemingly impossible to miss on the party circuit as well. There he was, beaming at the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s annual Spring Ball, as Muffie Potter Aston showed off one of his fitted red gowns. And there he was at Vanity Fair’s Tribeca Film Festival opening-night party with the Asian actress Tao Okamoto, who was modeling a yellow pannier dress that had scroll-like embroidery. How about the Costume Institute gala, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera and the premiere of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” on Broadway? Well, Mr. Posen was at all of those, too.
And on Monday, Mr. Posen will be arm in arm with Juliette Lewis at the C.F.D.A.’s as she becomes the latest, if perhaps not the most famous, star wearing one of his dresses. (And though you may not spot Mr. Posen there, his presence can be felt at the restaurant Carbone, the newest hot spot from the owners of Torrisi Italian Specialties and Parm: Mr. Posen designed the waitstaff’s uniforms.)
To Mr. Posen, however, this seemingly heady social calendar is positively tame compared with what his (not quite) misspent youth was like. As he noted: “I actually probably go out less frequently in the last four of five years than I ever did during the earlier part of my career. Obviously it’s important to be able to lend your face and presence to causes you believe are important to you.”
“But my daily life is at the studio, walking my dogs and cooking at home,” he added.. “And it’s a pretty methodical existence.”
Old habits die hard.
Zac Posen grew up in SoHo and attended St. Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, a progressive school with exacting standards but no grades.
His schoolmates included Julian Schnabel’s daughter Lola, as well as Ms. Dunham, whose parents hired Mr. Posen to take her to school on the N and the R trains because they lived in the same neighborhood and Mr. Posen was five years older.
Here is how Ms. Dunham described Mr. Posen’s demeanor back then: “He would come and baby-sit me after school, which consisted of him doing my hair like a newscaster. He wasn’t one of those baby sitters who let you eat trash while they talked to their friends. He was very focused and very nurturing, and I was proud to know him because I was a seventh grader and he was a 12th grader, and all the coolest girls in school were wearing things he made them.”
She added: “He always kind of comported himself like a person of influence and a person of taste, and it was the most arresting thing to see a 16-year-old boy walk around with this kind of a Quentin Crisp thing going on. And so, in that way, I think he’s just grown into himself because now he has the experience and the authority to back up that awesome, creative confidence.”
After high school, Mr. Posen studied at Central St. Martins in London.
One night, Naomi Campbell spotted Lola Schnabel wearing one of his dresses at a party and decided she had to have one herself. In short order, word began to spread about the dapper young man who looked like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Count Dracula (he even had the cape to boot) and knew how to cut sexy, old-fashioned dresses, the kind worn by Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth in their day.
“He invited me over to his apartment,” said Julie Gilhart, the former fashion director at Barneys and one of Mr. Posen’s first champions. “It was like a basement apartment in a part of London I’d never been in, and he showed me this dress, and it was very ‘not wearable’ but it was incredibly creative and he had this great energy.”
By 2002, he’d had his first show in New York. Critics were divided over his somewhat nostalgic view of fashion and over-the-top glamour. But a number of editors, including Anna Wintour, recognized Mr. Posen’s talent and saw an opening for him in a market that was then oversaturated with trendy sportswear.
“Even starting out at such a young age, he’s always been very clear about who he is and what his design aesthetic is,” Ms. Wintour said in an interview Thursday. “He hasn’t worried about following the latest trends in fashion. He does like to make women look incredibly glamorous and sexy at night. He understands who his customer is, whether it’s a benefit in Texas or dressing a celebrity for the Met.”
In a 2003 article headlined, “Who Can Save New York Fashion?” Mr. Posen was singled out by WWD as one of a handful of young designers who had the potential to break into the industry’s top ranks.
Nevertheless, with accolades and investment capital came increasing expectations. There were failed attempts at starting a perfume collection. And early reactions to his secondary line, ZAC Zac Posen, were lackluster.
A new crop of young designers came along, like Jason Wu, Alexander Wang and Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, and each seemed to glide more easily toward financial viability. In particular, Proenza’s success, helped along by easy-to-wear young clothes, provided a stark juxtaposition to Mr. Posen’s stumbles. “There was a pea coat, a tank top, a slim skirt,” Ms. Gilhart said of the collections designed by Mr. McCollough and Mr. Hernandez, nominated yet again for the top awards at Monday’s ceremony. (If they win, it will be their fifth victory in 10 years.) “It grew fast, but all the right things converged. Zac was more specific. He had the elements, but it was more tailored, more dressed up. It was just more.”
One former executive from Mr. Posen’s company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a confidentiality clause in the person’s contract, said, “He’s incredibly talented, and I think he understood intrinsically that to be a business you have to be able to do more than cocktail wear, but I’m not sure he knew exactly how to get there.”
Beyond that, while movie stars looked great wearing Mr. Posen’s gowns, the designer himself had trouble fitting into his new role.
“When you dream of working and being a designer your whole childhood,” Mr. Posen said, “and then at the age of 20 or 21 an industry you’re not aware of, that you didn’t grow up in, that you don’t know, starts singing your praises, you’re thrown into a whole universe and world that can be overwhelming. It’s not necessarily that you believe the hype. But you’re surrounded by it at all moments, and fashion can be facilitating.”
A series of presidents came through the door and failed to get the business into the black. Then, in the fall of 2010, the company announced that Susan Posen, its longtime C.E.O., was relinquishing her role as well. As Mr. Posen explained, the exit was in the works for a long time. “It was a mutual decision” and “the right timing,” he said. He added that it was “wonderful” to be able to return to a familial relationship that was “not about the daily drive to run a fashion business.”
But he acknowledges that it came at a point when he needed to reassess who he was and what his goals for the future were.
“It was a transitional time when I had to do creative soul-searching about what my skill sets were, who I was and what kind of work and brand I wanted to build,” Mr. Posen said.
Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that he needed to rein in the focus of the company and center it on his ideas of “craftsmanship, glamour and innovation.” (Translated out of Vreeland-ese, this roughly means “evening wear.”)
Cont.....
By JACOB BERNSTEIN
(nytimes)
This February, Zac Posen went to the Oscars. Though he had been in Los Angeles and gone to the parties surrounding the awards several times over the last decade, the designer had never attended the actual ceremony at the Kodak Theater.
Yet Mr. Posen decided not to make his way down the red carpet, where the paparazzi were lined up three-deep.
“I walked on the side part,” he said about a week ago, sitting in his studio on the edge of SoHo and TriBeCa. “I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to be promoting myself as a celebrity. I haven’t worked on a film project.”
Um, just who was this Zac Posen and where did the other one go?
As almost anyone in fashion can tell you, there was a time not so long ago when the idea of his avoiding cameras and flashing lights would have seemed absurd. He had come onto the scene at age 20, not even out of design school, and was known for wearing evening tails to his fashion shows and speaking a dialect of English that could best be described as Vreeland-ese.
Three years later, Mr. Posen won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s award for new talent. Top-tier actresses like Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Claire Danes and Ellen Barkin regularly appeared front row at his shows. Sean Combs, then still known as Puff Daddy, jumped on board the Posen bandwagon as his big investor.
And then things became complicated: Ron Burkle, the chairman of Yucaipa Companies, provided an infusion of money into Mr. Combs’s clothing empire, took a controlling interest and — as Mr. Posen later said — began to impose stricter control on the designer’s finances. A series of executives on the business side came and went. So did Mr. Posen’s mother, Susan, a former mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had been the company’s chief executive and worked with her son since the company’s inception until her resignation in 2010. (She remains on the board.) Shortly before his mother’s abrupt move, Mr. Posen told The New York Times that he was in “survival mode.”
In the fall of 2010, Mr. Posen took his fashion show from New York to Paris, only to find after two seasons that the city didn’t exactly embrace him. Editors at many of the fashion magazines bristled at what they perceived as grandiose behavior, in part because of the hallowed site he used for his Paris debut. “Posen did himself no favors by choosing as his venue the spectacular, 19th-century gilded ballroom of the Westin Hotel, formerly the InterContinental, and still synonymous with the couture shows of the late Yves Saint Laurent,” Women’s Wear Daily sniped. “This room, and this city, it must be said, expects to see better clothes than what Posen paraded.” (Reviewing the show for The International Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes wrote that it was “a collection that had a peppy glamour but seemed more of a pastiche than a seductive path to fashion’s new direction.”)
Mr. Posen’s reputation for overreaching didn’t appear to come out of thin air. In an early interview with The Times of London, he blanched at comparisons that had been drawn between him and Michael Kors. “No way,” Mr. Posen said. “I’ve been compared to Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano, and yes, those make me happy.”
But then, something interesting happened. After a lot of burned bridges, Mr. Posen came home to New York and found an industry that was largely willing to forgive and welcome him back.
Harvey Weinstein booked him as Mr. Kors’s replacement on the most recent season of “Project Runway.” (Mr. Posen is expected to begin filming his second season as a judge soon). “He’s handsome, loquacious, and on ‘Runway’ opinionated works,” Mr. Weinstein said. “He’s opinionated.”
A slew of big-name fashion plates began wearing his dresses again. One was Oprah Winfrey, who donned one of Mr. Posen’s fancy floor-length gowns for her appearance at the 2011 Oscars. Another was Michelle Obama, who chose a red knit Posen dress for one of her appearances during the recent inauguration. This past awards season, Amanda Seyfried, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close all wore his showstopping gowns on the red carpet. Meanwhile, the designer collaborated with his childhood friend Lena Dunham on her Golden Globes dress, which was inspired by John Singer Sargent’s famed “Madame X” painting.
“People wouldn’t expect me to care about things like fit, but when you’re a curvier woman, you especially notice it,” Ms. Dunham said, speaking by phone last week. “I felt very attended to. My mother said, ‘It’s my favorite thing you’ve ever worn.’ ”
And more recently, Mr. Posen, now 32, has been seemingly impossible to miss on the party circuit as well. There he was, beaming at the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center’s annual Spring Ball, as Muffie Potter Aston showed off one of his fitted red gowns. And there he was at Vanity Fair’s Tribeca Film Festival opening-night party with the Asian actress Tao Okamoto, who was modeling a yellow pannier dress that had scroll-like embroidery. How about the Costume Institute gala, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera and the premiere of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” on Broadway? Well, Mr. Posen was at all of those, too.
And on Monday, Mr. Posen will be arm in arm with Juliette Lewis at the C.F.D.A.’s as she becomes the latest, if perhaps not the most famous, star wearing one of his dresses. (And though you may not spot Mr. Posen there, his presence can be felt at the restaurant Carbone, the newest hot spot from the owners of Torrisi Italian Specialties and Parm: Mr. Posen designed the waitstaff’s uniforms.)
To Mr. Posen, however, this seemingly heady social calendar is positively tame compared with what his (not quite) misspent youth was like. As he noted: “I actually probably go out less frequently in the last four of five years than I ever did during the earlier part of my career. Obviously it’s important to be able to lend your face and presence to causes you believe are important to you.”
“But my daily life is at the studio, walking my dogs and cooking at home,” he added.. “And it’s a pretty methodical existence.”
Old habits die hard.
Zac Posen grew up in SoHo and attended St. Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, a progressive school with exacting standards but no grades.
His schoolmates included Julian Schnabel’s daughter Lola, as well as Ms. Dunham, whose parents hired Mr. Posen to take her to school on the N and the R trains because they lived in the same neighborhood and Mr. Posen was five years older.
Here is how Ms. Dunham described Mr. Posen’s demeanor back then: “He would come and baby-sit me after school, which consisted of him doing my hair like a newscaster. He wasn’t one of those baby sitters who let you eat trash while they talked to their friends. He was very focused and very nurturing, and I was proud to know him because I was a seventh grader and he was a 12th grader, and all the coolest girls in school were wearing things he made them.”
She added: “He always kind of comported himself like a person of influence and a person of taste, and it was the most arresting thing to see a 16-year-old boy walk around with this kind of a Quentin Crisp thing going on. And so, in that way, I think he’s just grown into himself because now he has the experience and the authority to back up that awesome, creative confidence.”
After high school, Mr. Posen studied at Central St. Martins in London.
One night, Naomi Campbell spotted Lola Schnabel wearing one of his dresses at a party and decided she had to have one herself. In short order, word began to spread about the dapper young man who looked like a cross between Charlie Chaplin and Count Dracula (he even had the cape to boot) and knew how to cut sexy, old-fashioned dresses, the kind worn by Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth in their day.
“He invited me over to his apartment,” said Julie Gilhart, the former fashion director at Barneys and one of Mr. Posen’s first champions. “It was like a basement apartment in a part of London I’d never been in, and he showed me this dress, and it was very ‘not wearable’ but it was incredibly creative and he had this great energy.”
By 2002, he’d had his first show in New York. Critics were divided over his somewhat nostalgic view of fashion and over-the-top glamour. But a number of editors, including Anna Wintour, recognized Mr. Posen’s talent and saw an opening for him in a market that was then oversaturated with trendy sportswear.
“Even starting out at such a young age, he’s always been very clear about who he is and what his design aesthetic is,” Ms. Wintour said in an interview Thursday. “He hasn’t worried about following the latest trends in fashion. He does like to make women look incredibly glamorous and sexy at night. He understands who his customer is, whether it’s a benefit in Texas or dressing a celebrity for the Met.”
In a 2003 article headlined, “Who Can Save New York Fashion?” Mr. Posen was singled out by WWD as one of a handful of young designers who had the potential to break into the industry’s top ranks.
Nevertheless, with accolades and investment capital came increasing expectations. There were failed attempts at starting a perfume collection. And early reactions to his secondary line, ZAC Zac Posen, were lackluster.
A new crop of young designers came along, like Jason Wu, Alexander Wang and Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, and each seemed to glide more easily toward financial viability. In particular, Proenza’s success, helped along by easy-to-wear young clothes, provided a stark juxtaposition to Mr. Posen’s stumbles. “There was a pea coat, a tank top, a slim skirt,” Ms. Gilhart said of the collections designed by Mr. McCollough and Mr. Hernandez, nominated yet again for the top awards at Monday’s ceremony. (If they win, it will be their fifth victory in 10 years.) “It grew fast, but all the right things converged. Zac was more specific. He had the elements, but it was more tailored, more dressed up. It was just more.”
One former executive from Mr. Posen’s company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a confidentiality clause in the person’s contract, said, “He’s incredibly talented, and I think he understood intrinsically that to be a business you have to be able to do more than cocktail wear, but I’m not sure he knew exactly how to get there.”
Beyond that, while movie stars looked great wearing Mr. Posen’s gowns, the designer himself had trouble fitting into his new role.
“When you dream of working and being a designer your whole childhood,” Mr. Posen said, “and then at the age of 20 or 21 an industry you’re not aware of, that you didn’t grow up in, that you don’t know, starts singing your praises, you’re thrown into a whole universe and world that can be overwhelming. It’s not necessarily that you believe the hype. But you’re surrounded by it at all moments, and fashion can be facilitating.”
A series of presidents came through the door and failed to get the business into the black. Then, in the fall of 2010, the company announced that Susan Posen, its longtime C.E.O., was relinquishing her role as well. As Mr. Posen explained, the exit was in the works for a long time. “It was a mutual decision” and “the right timing,” he said. He added that it was “wonderful” to be able to return to a familial relationship that was “not about the daily drive to run a fashion business.”
But he acknowledges that it came at a point when he needed to reassess who he was and what his goals for the future were.
“It was a transitional time when I had to do creative soul-searching about what my skill sets were, who I was and what kind of work and brand I wanted to build,” Mr. Posen said.
Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that he needed to rein in the focus of the company and center it on his ideas of “craftsmanship, glamour and innovation.” (Translated out of Vreeland-ese, this roughly means “evening wear.”)
Cont.....
and what the hell was the difference between them?
