Zac poses on the launch of Gap Studio, Gap’s Luxe Under – Collection of $ 300

During the little more than a year since his appointment in February 2024 as a creative director at Gap Inc., Zac Posen transformed a brand of American heritage, most of them associated with carefully folded Kakis and the culture of the 90s shopping center, in a mastodon of the red carpet and a fashion precursor. But it was not the goal, in itself. Like most big ideas, Gap Studio came from a place towhy not?

“There was no plan for that,” said posen on an icy tea on the 7th floor of the brand’s city center space. Instead, Posen says he was hired as a kind of “Willy Wonka” for the company – someone to push the creativity from the inside, direct innovation and experience what means wearing a gap.

The president and chief executive officer of Gap, Richard Dickson, the man behind the cultural resurgence of Barbie in Mattel, wanted to see what would happen when you give creative force the keys to the chocolate factory. And although Posen, who directs the design, merchandising and marketing through Old Navy, Banana Republic and Gap, says that he spent his first months to know the inspections and successors of the company, he also found time to play.

Now these months of hard work and play are revealed: Gap Studio, a new collection designed by Posen within a collection for Gap, launches on April 3, offering the workshop craft at a price of less than $ 300.

Posen says: “We had this incredible moment when we had the opportunity to attend the Met Gala, and (we are asked), should be represented there?” The answer, of course, was why not? But doing it requires the best in biz. Thus, Posen “brought together a team of craftsmen and incredible craftsmen” to build a personalized play for Da’vine Joy Randolph.

The resulting dress, a Corsets made with several layers in Denim Gap, won the brand on the highest dressed rounds and evening moods through industry. Shortly after, the designer received a call from the celebrity stylist Erin Walsh, asking her if he would plan to create a personalized shirt dress for her client, Anne Hathaway. “Literally, the day after the Met, I started to cut our white shirt, to drape it and to rebuild it,” he recalls. “And within two weeks, we showed her on her, and she wore it.”

To say that the look has become viral is an understatement. Everyone, and I mean everyone, wanted a poplin dress in the shoulder to Hathaway’s shoulder. Again, Posen and his team asked, why not? And decided to produce the part in mass. “We put it on the market very quickly, and it sold in a few hours,” he said, throwing the online room last summer and creating a gap by the brand of brand Zac Posen.

The success of Hathaway’s creation was the time when the Gap studio team achieved “there is something to do this,” explains Posen. Other moments to dress in the celebrities followed: from half moore in a motorcycle jacket designed by Gap during his press tour for The substance has Timothee Chalamet during a dinner of the Oscars in Gap Duds of Inspiration of Bob Dylan. All this evidence of the success of the Gap red carpet asked another question: Why not Are you publishing a Full Gap Studio collection?

This is precisely the next step in store. Designed by the same team that cut the Bustier of Randolph and the Hathaway Hathaway, the GAP 01 studio collection operates attention to detail and the meticulous construction of the brand’s red carpet workshop for the GAP customer. There is a shirt inspired by Anne, this time in khaki and peas for the summer, and an adjusted denim lunch which evokes the silhouette of the hourglass of their creation of gala. (Both, Posen bets, will sell.)

But when the designer takes me on tour of the Physical Gap studio in New York, it is not the commercial viability of the assortment that is the most striking. In person, it is the details carefully considered, the stellar sewing and the reflected details that stand out. For example, the Gap Studio denim bralat offers clever seams and an easy -to -miss scrum edge while simply looking at a line leaf. The mini folds are both substantial and soft with a weight and stretching that would make you think that they are worth 3 times the price of less than $ 300. And the trumpetously simple sliding dresses are not only cut on the bias, they are sewn together from several pieces of fabric, creating an ultra-flattering hourglass which is impossible to find these days (in a shopping center or other), despite the popularity of the trend.

These small frills are all part of the charm of installation – after all, the designer has become a familiar name for his personalized evening clothes – and the installation process. In a free moment during our step -by -step procedure, the designer derived from a colleague draping a fabric on a mannequin at his cutting station, touching and turning the nascent shirt design to find the best absolute way possible to build it. He can’t help but create with intention.

“I have a lot of years of experience in production, within my own brand and in secondary brands, working for Brooks Brothers,” explains Posen on how he is able to provide a quality made out of hand. “I know in a way where things can be pushed.” He also pushes the trendy front to gap, offering younger parts with Gap Studio than you would generally find in the store.

The hems are shorter (see bubble skirts inspired by flowering with integrated shorts) and crops are tighter. The 01 collection has been concocted as a “dream wardrobe” for today’s modern buyer, who likes to mix and match, who dresses loud and down. “The culture of the shopping center is back. Online purchases are back. And, I know how girls and mamas and sisters buy today. As we share a cross, ”says Posen, quoting her sisters, friends and mom as inspiration. “It is this simplification of form, goal and meaning: the perfect khaki jacket, an astonishing trench, the denim dress of the body to an excellent-adjustment, a white shirt,” he adds.

These are the new icons that Posen has removed from the Paintbox space, raising and updating as and when. This is not your average trench trench (or shirt, or convjjonc dress), however. “I have to give the integrity of the products. It’s just in me, ”he says. Even the brand’s belt assortment (if you could call it) of corset size is intentional in its form and function. “It was like sculpting an instrument, building a violin and a form,” he said about the design process. “(You had to have) the right arc, the shape of the right right and the sufficient curvature.”

This does not mean that the brand’s heritage is not present in Gap Studio. The considerable archives of the company are a constant source of inspiration for the designer, and you can trace its influence in great way (like the comfortable sweatshirts of the collection) and the little ones. Posen takes up the “small finishing techniques” of gap clothes for past decades – “how rivets are made” to buttons and sewing – and even draw from the creative heritage of the most memorable campaigns of Gap in his work.

“I love working with our photo archives,” explains Posen, quoting “all the big portraits of the gap and the incredible prints” as a constant source of inspiration. In fact, the creation of an exhibition of Gap photo archives is on his “career bucket list”. But for the moment, he is content to create his own sparkling images, to type the next generation of creatives, icons and models for the inaugural campaign of the Gap Studio.

Photographed by the modern legend Mario Sorrenti and with Alex Consani, Imaan Hammam and Anok Yai – three models that make up the new track goalkeeper and who also happen to be IRL friends – the Gap Studio Toes campaign of the past and the present line. “I thought a lot about what the gap meant for me when I was a child,” explains Posen. “It was this idea of ​​the new retail modernity, and I think it was well in advance on its time and to think, what does it mean today?”

“As New Yorker, I have always seen Gap as a classic American brand and part of my youth,” said Sorrenti of the project. “The brand has embodied a sense of style without effort, and I am honored to contribute to its current history.” Alastair McKimm, a frequent collaborator of Posen, also helped bring the collection to life, adopting a fresh and loose approach to style at Gap Studio.

This feeling of play, evolution and why not? is ultimately what excites the most in his work at Gap Studio. “You should be able to throw it into battery and be able to redo many outfits,” he said about the new collection. For him, it is a question of giving customers the freedom to express their style with Gap Studio, of not dictating of terms or mode of gluttony.

“What is the most fun is to discover it in the street – how people interpret it, how people love it,” explains Posen. “Tage me, show me!” I want to see your best interpretations. Show me your five ways to wear it. ”