A Toe in the Water
As a kid growing up in New York, Zac Posen loved musical theater and crooned with a choir every day for 12 years. He always figured he’d come to Los Angeles to sing, act or direct. The 21-year-old has finally made it here, but not as an entertainer. Posen is in Los Angeles as a fashion designer, his creations hot off the catwalks of Manhattan, where he generated the kind of fashion buzz that Oscar week produces for Academy Award-nominated stars.
Armed with a rolling suitcase filled with the fierce and feminine collection he debuted last month, the freshman designer is poised for a Hollywood Zac attack.
“This was the time to launch myself here, to take L.A. by storm,” Posen says while setting up shop Wednesday at the Tracey Ross boutique on Sunset Boulevard. He opens the suitcase to reveal his ammunition: deep-V-neck gowns, silk and leather bias-cut cocktail dresses, sleek and sexy halter numbers ready for their red carpet close-up, Mr. DeMille.
He’s hoping the likes of best actress nominee Renee Zellweger--and, if she’s in town, Madonna, his favorite icon--will honor him by stepping out in one of his sexy numbers. “I’d love to make clothing for Michael Jackson. I think he’s totally nuts,” he adds. But for now he’s just thrilled that best supporting actress nominee Marisa Tomei is interested in wearing one of his creations for an Academy Awards-related luncheon. And Leelee Sobieski is keen on a Posen gown for Sunday night’s Vanity Fair bash at Morton’s restaurant, where he too will be a party guest. “Wouldn’t she look great in this?” he asks, reaching for a deep-V number. “She’d look great in anything, but this--this would be incredible.”
Ross, who is always searching out unique items for her shop, read about Posen, met him in New York and then decided that “the week of the Academy Awards, ‘You are coming out here,’” she told the designer, who is staying in Los Feliz with Vogue’s West Coast editor.
On Wednesday night Ross threw a cocktail party for Posen, who was thrilled to learn that many guests would later attend a party hosted by Tom Ford at the Gucci store in Beverly Hills. “We’re competing with Tom Ford tonight,” Posen says out loud before the party. “So we’ve got to give the crowd everything we’ve got. How about I put a lineup of mannequins outside, chained together on a red carpet?” Says a Ross employee: “Zac, you rock!”
A big fan of Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci, Ross speaks glowingly about Posen and “his fabulous silhouettes--fresh, young, beautifully designed couture-like pieces. Talent like Zac’s needs to be exposed. Besides, I’m such a cheerleader for the underdog.”
Smart, charismatic and courteous, Posen has become a darling of the fashion crowd, and it’s easy to see why. At his New York fashion week show, friends--among them one of the First Twins, Barbara Bush--often shouted out his name as models paraded the runway in jumpsuits, a red-hooded raincoat dress and a gown intricately constructed from strips of brown leather connected by more than 1,000 hand-sewn hooks and eyes.
He was able to stage his first show in February with $20,000 awarded to him from the Ecco Domani Foundation for young designers. Following that show, he was named one of five finalists in the Enka International Fashion Design competition, which recognizes rising stars of the fashion world “with the greatest artistic vision.” Among the judges were designers Donna Karan, Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto.
When Posen was in Milan earlier this month for the Italian fashion shows, he met with Enka officials to discuss using fabrics from one of the world’s leading manufacturers of viscose filament yarn for his spring/summer 2003 collection. He will also design his own fabrics and knits. The collection, to be financed by Enka, will be shown in Milan this fall. A smaller ready-to-wear sportswear line will also be shown this fall in New York.
If Posen’s collection wins, he will be awarded a European press campaign for his line and will design an Enka collection for at least three seasons.
“After New York, things have just been rolling for me,” Posen says about the interest in his clothes from several stores there and here, including Barneys New York, Henri Bendel and several specialty shops. Coming to L.A. was definitely on his radar not only to test the red-carpet waters but because aside from designer Rick Owens, an Angeleno, “I haven’t seen anything coming out of L.A. that has a different feel. I want to show L.A. something great.”
His cell phone rings. It’s his mom calling from their New York home, where she has been contacting party-givers in L.A. about getting her son into swanky shindigs. Mom knows only too well that making the rounds of the Oscar party circuit could pay off handsomely for her son.
“Hey, Mom. It’s been great,” he says. “Everything’s fine. Everyone’s taking care of me. OK, I’ll talk to you later. I love you.”
After the call, he continues, “My mom is really good with people, but she’s really scary to buyers because even though she’s really sweet, she’s also tough. I never thought I would be working with my mother, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m keeping my head on straight. That’s really important. I’m really a down-to-earth person, and I’m never gonna lose that. I’m a real person who’s planning on having my company for a long time.”
Posen established his privately owned company, Outspoke LLC, after graduating from Central St. Martin’s Design School in London in 2001. While there he started doing private couture work on the side, selling a dress a week. Back in New York he converted his parents’ SoHo loft into a design studio and, with $10,000 seed money, began work on his first official collection.
His father, Stephen, is a well-known painter and artist in New York. His mother, Susan, a mergers and acquisitions lawyer for 22 years, is now chief executive officer of her son’s company. His sister, Alexandra, 29, is his creative director. A master mask maker who graduated from the Jacques Lecoq School of Theatre in Paris, she helps her brother produce his shows as well as research and develop the lines.
Posen says being a fashion designer is something he always wanted to do. Starting at the age of 3, he created fantasy outfits for his She-Ra Princess of Power dolls: A piece of seaweed and netting formed a Spanish flamenco gown; paper doilies were transformed into a raglan-sleeved kimono.
Without knowing it, he was learning about silhouette and form, about draping and the lines of the human body. During high school he spent a summer at Parsons School of Design in New York, studying the techniques needed to draw correctly and execute patterns. He also interned for three summers and after school at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Under then-curator Richard Martin, he learned the importance of research in fashion--and peeping under dresses. Posen recalls how he would “lie on my back under Madeleine Vionnet dresses on exhibit and follow the seams,” soaking up as much as he could about the craft of dressmaking.
And now he finds himself on the floor at Tracey Ross, laying out his collection, deciding what should go on mannequins. “Sometimes it’s hard to believe this is where I am in my career right now because, you know, I’m 21.”
He’s barely old enough to order a cosmopolitan, and just three days ago his mom “gave me a hard time about driving because I don’t.”
“I am young, but I’m not naive,” he says. His age puts him “in a unique position” in the industry. It’s an advantage, he says, because he can break from the play-it-safe fashion pack, offering edgy creations and new silhouettes for women of all ages in a culture he finds “really sick because so much emphasis is placed on youth.”
“I love exploring and finding new ways for women to present themselves in clothes and the kinds of reaction that gets. That’s what you do when you are making clothing--you study people’s reactions. I’m a student of that--of reaction. I’m also an inventor who admires inventors like Walt Disney and Jim Henson. And I want to invent and find my own silhouettes and evolve” much in the same way that his fashion heroes, Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garcons and Azzedine Alaia, have done.
Then again, he says, “What I love most about fashion is that I think fashion is really funny. It’s a joke. And you have to take it really lightly.”
