Zac Posen:
Posen strikes a pose
alongside towering
models at his fall 2011
show at Paris Fashion
Week last March.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Fashion is no longer about
being the most fabulous
person in the room.
So why isn’t this guy
getting the memo?
00 nypost.com/pagesixmag
32
PSM_R_ZAC_POZEN8_.indd 1
8/29/11 5:37:02 PM
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
By Sarah Horne
ERIC RYAN/GETTY IMAGES
Fashion’s J
Biggest
Poseur
ust days before his fall 2006
collection debuted, Zac Posen
was in his Tribeca studio
holding court. The white-hot
fashion designer with a baby face and
cherubic jet-black curls watched as a
Russian beauty sashayed across the
floor in his latest creation, a magenta
party dress. After a dramatic pause, he
proclaimed the garment “perfection!”
Across the room, Posen’s CEO, his
mother Susan, was crouched on the
floor inspecting the hem of an evening
gown. His sister Alexandra, the company’s creative director, held pins in
her mouth, her brow furrowed. Posen,
meanwhile, was upbeat, caffeinated
and playful. In a past life, he mused,
he was “Mad King Ludwig” of Bavaria,
a deeply eccentric royal famed for his
lavish fairytale castles and his love of
elaborate uniforms. “I’d kill for his
clothes,” Posen laughed.
It was the sort of theatrical, campy
overstatement that Posen, accustomed
to an audience, was famed for. Now, just
five years later, it’s the kind of pose that
has critics declaring the 30-year-old
designer out of fashion.
Though editors and fashion insiders
concede that Posen is a rare talent, they
say his larger-than-life personality has
become a stumbling block. “Zac was
always ridiculous,” says a stylist who
has worked on Posen’s runway shows
and asked not to be named because of
their business relationship. “But then
he became a parody of himself. People
around him have a head for business
and try to rein him in, but he’s never
had to work from the bottom up, and
he’s too used to everyone flapping
around him to notice that his name
doesn’t mean what it used to.”
After exploding onto the fashion
scene in 2001, the precocious Posen
went from fashion student to rock
star in record time. His ultra-feminine
dresses, crafted in luxe fabrics, with
cinched waists, corseted bodices,
feathers and detailed seam work,
could cost up to $20,000. P. Diddy was
an investor as part of Yucaipa Companies, while divas like J.Lo, Beyoncé and
Eva Longoria donned Posen’s gowns
nypost.com/pagesixmag 00
33
PSM_R_ZAC_POZEN8_.indd 2
8/29/11 5:44:53 PM
‘‘
Zac Posen
is like a
Zoolander
character.
Some
designers
have real
friends at
magazines.
That’s not
the case
with Zac
thesedays.”
Posen with
Anna Wintour
at the launch of
his line at Saks
in fall 2009.
Posen’s ego has been slow to adjust.
While he still garbs stars like Oprah, who
wore a gunmetal-gray gown to this year’s
Academy Awards, he didn’t appear at her
fitting, dispatching a twentysomething
publicist to do the job instead. Posen, who
declined to be interviewed for this article,
would not comment on being a no-show.
But a former friend of his says the move
was “typical Zac. Who says no to Oprah?”
The volatile Posen has seen less and
less support from celebrities and magazines in part because of a perception that
he is rude and unlikable, says one magazine editor who knows the designer but
Balls to
theWall
Over the past
decade, Posen’s
madcap Met Ball
appearances have
both delighted
and amazed.
34 nypost.com/pagesixmag
PSM_R_ZAC_POZEN8_.indd 3
asked to remain anonymous to preserve
her relationship with the label.
“Zac Posen is like a Zoolander character. I’ve never seen a side to him that’s not
‘Zac Posen the Major Fashion Designer,’”
she says. “Some designers have real
friends at magazines who champion
them, but I’m not sure that’s the case
with Zac these days.”
Some say Posen, whose public persona
is still wrapped up in the no-holds-barred
silliness of pre-recession New York,
looks like a relic compared with the latest
wave of low-key designers like Doo-Ri
Chung, Jason Wu and Joseph Altazurra.
Suddenly, restraint rules the runways.
Robin Givhan, the Pulitzer Prize–winning
fashion critic, says that with the rise
of designers like the Rodarte girls, the
fashion world has “shifted the sensibility
away from hoopla and toward the craft.”
But Posen, who once decorated his
catwalk with five baby grand pianos, isn’t
known for his unassuming aesthetic.
With an artist father and a lawyerturned-venture-capitalist mother, Posen
was raised in Soho and first gained attention as a high school student, when
he began dressing classmates like Stella
Schnabel, the daughter of artist Julian
Schnabel. After graduating in 1999, he
went to London to study at Central
St. Martins, the prestigious art college
that turned out fashion stars Alexander
McQueen and Stella McCartney. He
certainly made an impression on his tutor, Howard Tangay, when he arrived at
school with strands of ivy tumbling from
his hair. “He just explodes with passion,”
Tangay has said.
After two years at St. Martin’s, impatient to launch his line, Posen moved
back to Manhattan, telling the UK’s Telegraph, “I want to be a major force.” He got
started in the fall of 2001 with the help
of his mother, clearing the living room of
their loft to make room for the clothes.
Givhan was a guest at Posen’s first runway show on the Lower East Side in 2002.
“He had an explosive first presentation,”
recalls Givhan, now a special correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast.
“He had some pretty big models walking,
and the young Barbara Bush was in the
audience. It was like, ‘Who is this kid?’ I
remember he came out in tails. At the end
of the show, he did this really deep bow…
There was nothing bashful about it. And I
remember being fascinated that he could
get such a significant group of people
there when he was a complete unknown.”
By the spring of 2004 Posen seemed
to have an endless supply of the fairy
dust that can transform a young fashion
student from a wannabe into the next
big thing. He leapfrogged from his Lower
East Side venue to Bryant Park’s main
tent with a capacity of nearly 1,100—a
space usually reserved for fashion giants
like Diane von Furstenberg or Michael
Kors. But Posen managed to fill it to the
rafters, creating spectacles worthy of a
rock concert while booking major models
for maximum press. At one show in
2006, the hall was so theatrically lit that
editors tripped over themselves trying
to find their seats. Recalls one: “It almost
seemed like they wanted to distract you
from the clothes, it was so dark.”
The fame hit so fast it became something of a handicap. “He had to deal with
a lot of things before he was ready to,”
Givhan notes. “People stopped thinking
of him as a new young designer. He gave
off this aura of somebody who was way
more established than he was.”
According to the stylist who worked
with him, Posen often behaved like a diva
at his studio, snapping at staffers. In 2007
he also began to lash out at his so-called
friends. In February of that year, the
socialite Arden Wohl, known mostly for
her love of headbands, became the object
of Posen’s wrath when she dared to show
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: KEVIN MAZUR/WIRE IMAGE; MICHAEL LOCCISANO/FILM MAGIC;
JENNIFER GRAYLOCK/AP PHOTO; DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/WIRE IMAGE; GUCCI VIA GETTY IMAGES
for their red-carpet appearances.
In the past year, however, Posen’s
family-run company has been beset by
internal squabbles and plagued by turnover. His mother was ousted from the
firm last October, and he has returned to
show his collections in New York after a
failed quest to take Paris by storm. While
he opened a new store in the Meatpacking
District late last month, Saks—the only
department store to stock his bridge line,
Z Spoke—has dropped his account.
2004
2003 Dapper with
childhood friend
Eva Amurri in
revealing scarlet.
Dressed in
folk wear
with Stella
Schnabel
for the
Dangerous
Liaisons–
themed
celebration.
2006
20
2005 Clad like a
Guys and Dolls
gangster with
model Raquel
Zimmermann.
Dol
Dolled
up as a
toreador with
tor
socialite
soc
Jessica Joffe.
Jes
8/29/11 5:45:30 PM
2008
2007 Well suited
with Lucy Liu in
a flowing purple
gown.
For the
Superheroes
gala, Posen
upstaged his
date, actress
Kate Mara, in
a bright blue
satin suit.
2010 Stepping
out with dreamy
Doutzen Kroes in
a fairytale tulle
confection.
“He never
had to work
from the
bottom up,
and he
[doesn’t]
notice that
his name
doesn’t
mean what
it used to.
Posen with his
mother, Susan.
Sources say she
has coddled the
designer.
latest offering for Z Spoke also features
more grounded, even sensible, looks—a
departure from his megawatt red-carpet
moments.
He is also bringing his runway show back
to Manhattan. This season Posen will show
his spring 2012 collection at 6:30 p.m. on
Sunday, September 11, at Lincoln Center’s
Avery Fisher Hall—a weekend time slot
that’s less than alluring to major editors.
“I really grew up in a different way this
year,” Zac told the Wall Street Journal last
spring. But as Posen faces the new, more
workaday realities of a changing industry,
some of the magic that made him a star
may be lost. “Zac reminds me of another
era in fashion,” Givhan says. “He’s a
maestro. It reminds me of a time when
there was an embrace of fashion as this
fun, entertaining industry.
“He’s got a lot more competition now,”
she continues. Early on in his career, “he
was one of a only a few young guns. But
people like Jason Wu have cut into a lot
of the razzle-dazzle that he once owned.
When you burn that white hot, eventually you burn out,” the critic adds. “That
overwhelming hotness has cooled off.”
CLOC
CLOCKWISE
FROM TOP: JOHNNY NUNEZ/WIRE IMAGE; RON GALELLA/WIRE IMAGE; DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/FILMMAGIC;
STEPHEN LOVEKIN/GETTY IMAGES; LAWRENCE LUCIER/FILMMAGIC
STEP
was detracting from Posen the brand. And
he wanted both to be taken more seriously.
But this, too, proved to be a problem.
One of Posen’s most serious stumbles,
insiders say, was his decision to move
his fashion shows from New York to
Paris in the fall of 2010. “There is no
reason for me to show my collection in
New York, because it’s not about craft
and technique there,” sniffed Posen,
alienating—well, the city’s entire fashion
establishment.
If Posen thought his move to Paris
signaled his rise to the status of European
icons like Yves Saint Laurent, his reviews
told another story. The New York Times’
Cathy Horyn sniped: “Mr. Posen’s [spring
2011] collection was…a bit generic: a
glamorous romp of feathers, sheer, slithery dresses and plume-tipped stilettos.”
But the poor reception did not deter
Posen, who has become oddly insular and
has lost a sense of his place within the industry, according to the ex-friend. When
John Galliano was ousted from Dior
last spring for anti-Semitic comments,
people who knew Posen joked that he
was “up all night, waiting for the call to
take the job,” she adds. “He truly believes
he’s in the same league as Tom Ford or
Alexander McQueen, that hundreds of
thousands of people would line up to see
him at the Met.”
His mother’s long-standing role within
the company had only served to fluff
Posen’s ego, the source explains. “He’s
her son, so of course she thinks he’s a
genius. She’s the mother who placates
the petulant child,” she says. Last fall,
as Yucaipa Companies pressured the designer to turn a profit, Posen’s mother was
replaced by executive Susan Davidson.
As a result, Posen is now intent on
changing the narrative, proving he can
be both artful and commercially viable.
With a recent Target line under his belt,
he is making a bid for the masses. His
‘‘
up to his Fashion Week afterparty wearing another designer’s dress. Sources told
Page Six that Posen “kicked Wohl out of
the Fashion Week afterparty at Midtown
eatery Amalia. He yelled, ‘How dare you,
you traitor,’ and then pushed her in the
forehead with his finger.”
By 2009 the Zac Posen team was
experiencing significant turbulence, and
Posen was acting out in response. After
a Cartier party that April, word surfaced
that he had approached Glenda Bailey,
the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar,
and voiced his outrage at having been
asked to pose alongside a Sesame Street
character for a fashion spread. “I didn’t
want to model with the Count,” Posen
later told the New York Times.
According to a source who was there
that evening, “Zac had convinced himself
that [the request] was insulting. For some
reason he thought it was anti-Semitic.”
For the spread, which appeared in the
September 2009 issue of the magazine,
Oscar de la Renta posed with Grover and
Diane von Furstenberg posed with Big
Bird. Posen was nowhere to be seen.
According to several fashion editors,
his penchant for confrontation began to
get out of hand. Posen regularly made
calls to key editors asking why his clothes
hadn’t been pictured in their pages or
complaining about their placement. “He
was desperately frustrated and insecure,”
says a former friend who asked not to be
named because she fears retribution. He
couldn’t stand seeing labels like Rodarte
getting attention, she adds.
In late 2009 Posen’s VP of communications, Karen Duffy, announced that her
position had been eliminated. Posen also
downsized from the glitzy main tent and
instead showed his spring 2010 collection
(at the unfashionable hour of 9 a.m.) in
the Altman Building, known for its presentations of less acclaimed designers.
According to insiders, Posen the person
2011
Hitting the
carpet with
Christina
Ricci in a sexy
exy
mermaid
creation.
36 nypost.com/pagesixmag
PSM_R_ZAC_POZEN8_.indd 4
8/29/11 5:46:50 PM