At the turn of this decade, designer Zac Posen was practically passé.
The Soho-reared boy wonder who’d been generating buzz since even before launching his label in 2001 was, by 2009, laying off employees and forging a sour reputation.
“Zac was always ridiculous,” a stylist who worked on Posen’s runway shows told Page Six magazine in 2011. “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.” In the same feature, a magazine editor put it another way: “Zac Posen is like a ‘Zoolander’ character.”
After burning bridges and taking his poorly-received fall 2010 runway show from New York to Paris, it seemed Posen would play victim to a clichéd, hubris-laden, Icarus-type downfall. But, like Scarlett O’Hara hell-bent on rebuilding Tara, the designer quietly repositioned himself in fashion one well-constructed curtain at a time. The industry, ever-so-fickle but also forgiving, has reinvited him to the ball.
In fact, this year the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly inaugurated Anna Wintour Costume Center themed its annual extravaganza around midcentury couturier Charles James, one of Posen’s biggest influences. Subsequently, practically everyone not wearing Posen on the gala’s ill-fated red carpet looked a little subpar.
Just call it the Zac Posen zeitgeist, which should come as no surprise. In a world of normcore, couture sneakers and gender-bending minimalism, folks are clearly starved for some good old-fashioned glamour.
Click through to see the celebs kindling Posen’s riveting revival.