Welcome to our podcast, Who What Put on With Hillary Kerr. Consider it as your direct line to the designers, stylists, magnificence consultants, editors, and tastemakers who’re shaping the fashion-and-beauty world. Subscribe to Who What Put on With Hillary Kerr on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Zac Posen started his profession in trend design within the late ’90s and rapidly accelerated from making attire out of his residence to working his eponymous luxurious womenswear line for 18 years. His designs have been worn by main women comparable to Natalie Portman, music icons together with Rihanna, and even former First Girl Michelle Obama. Chances are you’ll know him as a former choose on Venture Runway or as the present govt vice chairman and artistic director of Hole Inc. and chief inventive officer at Previous Navy. As if there is not sufficient on his plate, he additionally designs costumes for movie and TV initiatives, the newest of which being Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans on FX.
For the newest episode of Who What Put on With Hillary Kerr, Posen sits down with Who What Put on Editor in Chief Kat Collings to share his design course of for creating every of the appears for the swans within the iconic Black and White Ball scene and extra.
For excerpts from their dialog, scroll under.
One of many first initiatives you designed costumes for was the 2022 movie The Outfit, directed by Academy Award winner Graham Moore. The Outfit is actually the title of this piece; it is referencing costuming. So I am curious how you bought that gig? Was it one thing that you simply’d been desirous to discover?
I imply, I am at all times occupied with costume. Working a trend firm, overseeing 16 clothes collections a yr, you do not get that many alternatives. My costuming for a few years was dressing the pink carpet, type of this blurred-reality pageantry dialogue with the general public leisure second of trend and media on performers. So I bought my repair there.
After which over time, I labored with Patricia Subject for the marriage scene of Intercourse and the Metropolis film after which Intercourse and the Metropolis 2. After which you already know, a little bit piece on Ocean’s 8 on Rihanna in her transformation scene. I’ve additionally, over time, been quietly consulting on a whole lot of issues that deal in trend, in script writing and screenplays. I like that course of of manufacturing and EP’ing. After which I used to be buddies with the producer who launched me to Graham, and I used to be actually early on the mission concerned, you already know, rewriting scripts, taking notes on scripts. So I bought this chance, and it was about suiting and tailoring and about homicide.
And I had this loopy concept to carry Huntsman tailoring into it to make Mark Rylance’s go well with, but additionally then, as a result of [Rylance is] such a heavy researcher, it gave him the expertise of constructing his personal go well with and job shadowing with precise grasp tailors. They turned out superbly, I imply, type of whet my urge for food for that.
For these of us who will not be as aware of Truman Capote and his Nineteen Seventies high-society friendships and among the scandal that occurred there, are you able to give us a little bit context?
Completely. Nicely, Truman Capote was a sensational author. He maintained friendships with among the most powerfully social girls in society. And he wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s. He then bought referred to as to put in writing and analysis a homicide case, which was very uncommon for him. And he wrote this ebook In Chilly Blood.
He got here again after a number of years of writing In Chilly Blood to nice crucial acclaim. And he lastly was given the nice respect he felt he deserved as a result of he was by no means actually taken critically. He additionally acquired sufficient cash that he might be completely happy and really feel fabulous and have the great life.
So Truman decides to throw the social gathering of the century. And at that time, it may be who he invitations, who he needs. He’s the style barometer. That is additionally a really transitional time in New York historical past. It is the late ’60s. Vietnam is brewing. There’s an actual social financial unrest. It is also a second when the Royals, or the nice socials of Europe with the new-money wealth, began to combine with Hollywood—began to combine with artwork and Andy Warhol and tradition. So popular culture began mixing with excessive society. And Truman was going to place all of it collectively within the end result of what he titled, you already know, the social gathering of the yr, the best social gathering, the Black and White Ball. And that is the place I got here in.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of FX Networks)
[Ryan Murphy and I] talked about what the general theme was. And we needed this complete scene to really feel like aquatic birds.
Every girl clearly had their particular person designer of alternative. I needed to interpret, to be completely different designers, and reimagine that but additionally dwell as much as an magnificence, however theatricality, that the up to date viewers one thing traditionally would anticipate à la the Met Gala.
I began sculpting this feather coat for Naomi Watts, who performs Babe Paley, she’s our Swan queen. So I created this very sculptured coat that just about appeared like a swan.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of FX Networks)
And C.Z. Visitor, who’s performed by Chloë Sevigny, the well-known pearls that the character wears in a strapless costume. Identical to the gesture of a swan and her elegant milkiness of a personality, and he or she was an amazing equestrian. I discovered a silk flower place—one of many final couture silk flower locations left in New York—within the garment district that made flowers for the balls or re-creating items that I discovered that may have been blocks from that yr. And I put these behind her costume similar to a little bit trace that they are like horse prizes.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of FX Networks)
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of FX Networks)
Slim Keith, performed by Diane Lane, is one in every of my favourite model icons. She went by way of, clearly, an amazing evolution at this era in her life. I knew I needed to place her in pants. That was actually necessary to me. So I did these jumpsuit pants on her. I put her in sun shades as a result of Slim was simply cooler than cool. As an alternative of a masks, proper? Slim walks in with this billowing graphic coat that in all probability would have been approach excessive for the precise occasion, and in addition for her stylistically, however we needed to have this grand entrance. I needed one thing that just about ballooned and full of air.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy of FX Networks)
You’ll be able to stream FX’s Feud now.
This interview has been edited and condensed for readability. Subsequent, try our NYFW episode.
