When the 44-year-old fashion designer moved to San Francisco a year ago for a job as executive vice president and creative director at Gap Inc., he wondered when the SF Ballet would come a calling. “I was kind of pre-crystal-balling it,” he smiles. “What? I'm a Scorpio.”
The celebrated designer has worked with costume and dance quite a bit over the years, including projects with the New York City Ballet. Posen’s fiancé Harrison Ball is a former principal ballet dancer at the company.
The idea that San Francisco Ballet would reach out is not at all crazy. It’s the how and when that seems a bit witchy. Posen explains: “In my first month or two in the job, I got a message from Bob Fisher [son of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher and current Gap board member] saying he had run into Tamara [Rojo, SF Ballet’s artistic director], and would I be interested in doing costumes for a ballet?
Zac, please teach us your manifesting ways.
Fast-forward to Thursday, February 13th, 2025, and a nattily dressed Posen is seated in the audience at the War Memorial Opera House for opening night of “Cool Britannia,” an homage to British choreographers via a trio of singular, one-act ballets. (The two ballets that sandwich Posen’s are “Chroma” by Sir Wayne McGregor and “Dust” by Akram Khan.)
As the curtain goes up on Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour, Posen watches as his ethereal and unfussy costumes do what they were meant to do: transport the audience to another world.
“Zac Posen’s designs bring gorgeous new vision to Christopher Wheeldon’s work, which was created for San Francisco Ballet in 2008—a fitting project to welcome our new resident of San Francisco,” Rojo says. “This collaboration is a testament to the strength of the city’s creative sector.”
Once Posen and Rojo met, it was an instant yes-yes, and off to the ballet they went. But which ballet would it be? After some time in limbo, Posen got the news it would be the Wheeldon piece. “I love his work, and my partner Harrison has worked with him extensively at NYC Ballet,” Posen says. “But when I found out this piece originated at SF Ballet, I felt quite honored.”
Posen's task was to bring a modern visual identity to the returning ballet while also honoring Wheeldon. “Immediately, I’m thinking about how to bring the piece into today,” says Posen.
Posen and Wheeldon talked about the history and purity of the ballet, where it came from, where it could go, all of its facets. Wheeldon’s original inspiration comes from Gustav Klimt paintings in combo with those beautiful spots in the SF landscape where water, sky, and reflection meet.
“I watched the original ballet, but then I wanted to clear my head of what I had seen because it can be pretty intense and influential,” he explains.
From that point on, Posen just immersed himself in the music. In the early mornings before spending most weekdays cloistered inside Gap’s Embarcadero HQ, he would just stare out into the bay from the deck of his Telegraph Hill home. “Then at night, I would watch the incredible bay and city sky change in magical ways. I got really inspired by these moments and incredible colors that are kind of bay and oceanic,” he says.
It's so sweet listening to a hardcore Manhattanite like Posen gush about Northern California. (For the record, Posen and Ball spend time in both SF and NYC.) “The amazing climate and skies here are like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s epic. It’s heroic and very magical. It touched me. And, obviously, hits parts of the themes of Chris’ piece," he says.
San Francisco skies, sunrises, and sunsets were meaningful muses to Posen, who also called out Mark Rothko’s work as inspiration: “I love how his paintings take you into a place.”
Boiling it down, Posen knew this was no place for giant tutus. The costumes needed to be simplified, modern, and unpretentious. From Posen's perspective, the costumes are meant to "highlight the poetry of Wheeldon’s choreography along with the beautiful form of the dancers."
Posen chose to focus on color, using ombrés and fades that mimic the ever-shifting streaks in the sky, especially during golden hour. “There are deep crimsons, really amazing yellows and ochres, and some darker hues that appear when the clouds and light go just beyond the horizon. For those, I'm playing with dégradés...oranges, reds, peaches.”
The silhouettes are simple and romantic yet tailored to highlight the bodies of the dancers, which is something Wheeldon wanted. Along with the basic male leotard, there are dresses in a few different shapes that land on the knee.
Bravo, Zac. You look really good in San Francisco (and vice versa).
// Cool Britannia is at San Francisco Ballet through February 19; tickets are available at sfballet.org.
