Inside the Great Gap Glow-Up

Can Zac Posen, known for over-the-top glamour, reinvent the American mall brand — and change his reputation in the process?

On Friday morning, just at the start of New York Fashion Week, more than 1,000 designers, models, factory workers, editors, retailers and influencers will gather in front of Macy’s Herald Square and march up Broadway to Bryant Park to get out the vote. Most of them will be wearing the same thing: a white T-shirt (or T-shirt dress) with black letters that spell out the doodled slogan “Fashion for Our Future.” The designer: Zac Posen, for Old Navy.

In other words, what is essentially a giant Old Navy show is going to be one of the first big events of New York Fashion Week.

“Crazy, right?” Mr. Posen said a few weeks earlier. He was bouncing on his toes in his glass-walled corner office at Gap Inc.’s headquarters in San Francisco, showing off a sample T-shirt. Crazy, he meant, that most of New York fashion would deign to don the same tee — and crazy that it would be one of his.

After all, in 2019, Mr. Posen, former dauphin of New York fashion, protégé of Tom Ford, prince of the red carpet, became the cautionary tale of the industry: the hotshot who lost his way, his name and his brand, in the wilds of ego and private equity. Since then, he had been cobbling together a freelance collaboration here, a private commission there, to make ends meet. He was, professionally, off the radar.

So were Old Navy and its parent company, Gap Inc., the onetime avatar of cool Americana that had turned khakis and a white T-shirt into a billion-dollar behemoth once modeled by Joan Didion and LL Cool J. Overexpansion and excessive discounting had sent it on a 20-year decline, left behind by the fast-fashion giants Zara and H&M. A series of chief executives had promised turnarounds only to see sales slow and the stock fall ever farther. An ill-fated deal in 2020 with Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, left the company with egg on its face.

The group is still big — last year’s sales were $14.9 billion — but it had become “just product,” said Anna Wintour, the chief content officer of Condé Nast. “It had the name, it had the recognition, but there was no sense of excitement.”