Yet Mr. Posen decided not to make his way down the red carpet, where the paparazzi were lined up three-deep.
“I walked on the side part,” he said about a week ago, sitting in his studio on the edge of SoHo and TriBeCa. “I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to be promoting myself as a celebrity. I haven’t worked on a film project.”
Um, just who was this Zac Posen and where did the other one go?
As almost anyone in fashion can tell you, there was a time not so long ago when the idea of his avoiding cameras and flashing lights would have seemed absurd. He had come onto the scene at age 20, not even out of design school, and was known for wearing evening tails to his fashion shows and speaking a dialect of English that could best be described as Vreeland-ese.
Three years later, Mr. Posen won the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s award for new talent. Top-tier actresses like Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Claire Danes and Ellen Barkin regularly appeared front row at his shows. Sean Combs, then still known as Puff Daddy, jumped on board the Posen bandwagon as his big investor.
And then things became complicated: Ron Burkle, the chairman of Yucaipa Companies, provided an infusion of money into Mr. Combs’s clothing empire, took a controlling interest and — as Mr. Posen later said — began to impose stricter control on the designer’s finances. A series of executives on the business side came and went. So did Mr. Posen’s mother, Susan, a former mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had been the company’s chief executive and worked with her son since the company’s inception until her resignation in 2010. (She remains on the board.) Shortly before his mother’s abrupt move, Mr. Posen told The New York Times that he was in “survival mode.”
In the fall of 2010, Mr. Posen took his fashion show from New York to Paris, only to find after two seasons that the city didn’t exactly embrace him. Editors at many of the fashion magazines bristled at what they perceived as grandiose behavior, in part because of the hallowed site he used for his Paris debut. “Posen did himself no favors by choosing as his venue the spectacular, 19th-century gilded ballroom of the Westin Hotel, formerly the InterContinental, and still synonymous with the couture shows of the late Yves Saint Laurent,” Women’s Wear Daily sniped. “This room, and this city, it must be said, expects to see better clothes than what Posen paraded.” (Reviewing the show for The International Herald Tribune, Suzy Menkes wrote that it was “a collection that had a peppy glamour but seemed more of a pastiche than a seductive path to fashion’s new direction.”)
Mr. Posen’s reputation for overreaching didn’t appear to come out of thin air. In an early interview with The Times of London, he blanched at comparisons that had been drawn between him and Michael Kors. “No way,” Mr. Posen said. “I’ve been compared to Yves Saint Laurent and John Galliano, and yes, those make me happy.”
But then, something interesting happened. After a lot of burned bridges, Mr. Posen came home to New York and found an industry that was largely willing to forgive and welcome him back.
Harvey Weinstein booked him as Mr. Kors’s replacement on the most recent season of “Project Runway.” (Mr. Posen is expected to begin filming his second season as a judge soon). “He’s handsome, loquacious, and on ‘Runway’ opinionated works,” Mr. Weinstein said. “He’s opinionated.”
A slew of big-name fashion plates began wearing his dresses again. One was Oprah Winfrey, who donned one of Mr. Posen’s fancy floor-length gowns for her appearance at the 2011 Oscars. Another was Michelle Obama, who chose a red knit Posen dress for one of her appearances during the recent inauguration. This past awards season, Amanda Seyfried, Naomi Watts and Glenn Close all wore his showstopping gowns on the red carpet. Meanwhile, the designer collaborated with his childhood friend Lena Dunham on her Golden Globes dress, which was inspired by John Singer Sargent’s famed “Madame X” painting.
“People wouldn’t expect me to care about things like fit, but when you’re a curvier woman, you especially notice it,” Ms. Dunham said, speaking by phone last week. “I felt very attended to. My mother said, ‘It’s my favorite thing you’ve ever worn.’ ”