Who What Wear Podcast: Zac Posen

(Image credit: Collins Nai)

published 28 February 2024

Welcome to our podcast, Who What Wear With Hillary Kerr. Think of it as your direct line to the designers, stylists, beauty experts, editors, and tastemakers who are shaping the fashion-and-beauty world. Subscribe to Who What Wear With Hillary Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Zac Posen began his career in fashion design in the late '90s and quickly accelerated from making dresses out of his apartment to running his eponymous luxury womenswear line for 18 years. His designs have been worn by leading ladies such as Natalie Portman, music icons including Rihanna, and even former First Lady Michelle Obama. You may know him as a former judge on Project Runway or as the current executive vice president and creative director of Gap Inc. and chief creative officer at Old Navy. As if there isn't enough on his plate, he also designs costumes for film and TV projects, the latest of which being Ryan Murphy's Feud: Capote vs. the Swans on FX.

For the latest episode of Who What Wear With Hillary Kerr, Posen sits down with Who What Wear Editor in Chief Kat Collings to share his design process for creating each of the looks for the swans in the iconic Black and White Ball scene and more.

For excerpts from their conversation, scroll below.

One of the first projects you designed costumes for was the 2022 film The Outfit, directed by Academy Award winner Graham Moore. The Outfit is literally the title of this piece; it's referencing costuming. So I'm curious how you got that gig? Was it something that you'd been wanting to explore?

I mean, I'm always interested in costume. Running a fashion company, overseeing 16 clothing collections a year, you don't get that many opportunities. My costuming for many years was dressing the red carpet, kind of this blurred-reality pageantry dialogue with the public entertainment moment of fashion and media on performers. So I got my fix there.

And then over the years, I worked with Patricia Field for the wedding scene of Sex and the City movie and then Sex and the City 2. And then you know, a little piece on Ocean's 8 on Rihanna in her transformation scene. I've also, over the years, been quietly consulting on a lot of things that deal in fashion, in script writing and screenplays. I like that process of producing and EP'ing. And then I was friends with the producer who introduced me to Graham, and I was really early on the project involved, you know, rewriting scripts, taking notes on scripts. So I got this opportunity, and it was about suiting and tailoring and about murder.

And I had this crazy idea to bring Huntsman tailoring into it to make Mark Rylance's suit, but also then, because [Rylance is] such a heavy researcher, it gave him the experience of making his own suit and job shadowing with actual master tailors. They turned out beautifully, I mean, kind of whet my appetite for that.

For those of us who may not be as familiar with Truman Capote and his 1970s high-society friendships and some of the scandal that happened there, can you give us a little context?

Absolutely. Well, Truman Capote was a sensational writer. He maintained friendships with some of the most powerfully social women in society. And he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's. He then got called to write and research a murder case, which was very unusual for him. And he wrote this book In Cold Blood.

He came back after a few years of writing In Cold Blood to great critical acclaim. And he finally was given the great respect he felt he deserved because he was never truly taken seriously. He also received enough money that he could be happy and feel fabulous and have the good life.

So Truman decides to throw the party of the century. And at that point, it's going to be who he invites, who he wants. He is the taste barometer. This is also a very transitional time in New York history. It's the late '60s. Vietnam is brewing. There's a real social economic unrest. It's also a moment when the Royals, or the great socials of Europe with the new-money wealth, started to mix with Hollywood—started to mix with art and Andy Warhol and culture. So pop culture started mixing with high society. And Truman was going to put it all together in the culmination of what he titled, you know, the party of the year, the greatest party, the Black and White Ball. And that's where I came in.

[Ryan Murphy and I] talked about what the overall theme was. And we wanted this whole scene to feel like aquatic birds.

Each lady obviously had their individual designer of choice. I had to interpret, to be different designers, and reimagine that but also live up to an elegance, but theatricality, that the contemporary audience looking at something historically would expect à la the Met Gala.

I started sculpting this feather coat for Naomi Watts, who plays Babe Paley, she's our Swan queen. So I created this very sculptured coat that almost looked like a swan.

And C.Z. Guest, who's played by Chloë Sevigny, the famous pearls that the character wears in a strapless dress. Just like the gesture of a swan and her elegant milkiness of a character, and she was a great equestrian. I found a silk flower place—one of the last couture silk flower places left in New York—in the garment district that made flowers for the balls or re-creating pieces that I found that might have been blocks from that year. And I put those in the back of her dress just like a little hint that they're like horse prizes.

Slim Keith, played by Diane Lane, is one of my favorite style icons. She went through, obviously, a great evolution at this period in her life. I knew I wanted to put her in pants. That was really important to me. So I did these jumpsuit pants on her. I put her in sunglasses because Slim was just cooler than cool. Instead of a mask, right? Slim walks in with this billowing graphic coat that probably would have been way over the top for the actual event, and also for her stylistically, but we wanted to have this grand entrance. I wanted something that almost ballooned and filled with air.