This year’s awards season brought a surprise fashion comeback: Gap. Everyone from Timothée Chalamet and Demi Moore to Cynthia Erivo and Anne Hathaway has worn the US high-street brand on the red carpet in the past year, and this month parent company Gap Inc released its most recent financial results – with sales up 7%.
Joy Montgomery, commerce editor at Vogue, describes Hathaway’s decision to wear a luxe version of a white shirt dress later sold in store, which the actor wore to a Bulgari event last year – as “a moment that the fashion world sat up and realised that something was changing”.
Gap was founded in San Francisco in 1969 and is part of the group which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy. It was a classic of 90s preppy style: the jeans and logo sweatshirts were a ubiquitous sight for decades. However, the brand struggled in recent years. It closed all its stores in the UK and Ireland in 2021, and a collaboration with Kanye West was terminated in 2022 after the rapper made antisemitic remarks.
The recent uptick is largely thanks to a new team. In 2023, Richard Dickson – who previously worked at toy brand Mattel and had a hand in Barbie’s cultural renaissance – became chief executive. Dickson hired New York fashion veteran Zac Posen as creative director. Posen was a favourite of many Hollywood celebrities when he had his own label, and now some are wearing his Gap dresses instead.
Dickson’s reign is about celebrating the heyday of the 90s and 00s – and adapting it for 2025. Talking-point advertising has always been part of the Gap playbook. In the 90s, the brand’s ads starred cultural figures including Madonna, Spike Lee, Joan Didion and Missy Elliott.
The spring 2025 campaign featured Parker Posey, who became a star in the 90s and is now enjoying her own renaissance in the hit TV series The White Lotus. The ad follows similar high-production videos starring musicians who appeal to a gen Z customer: Tyla and Troye Sivan.
Brittaney Kiefer, creative editor of Ad Weekly, said: “I remember their ads with Sarah Jessica Parker, Lenny Kravitz or Aerosmith. They cut through in a way a lot of campaigns don’t.” Kiefer argues that the brand is using the same formula – “energetic, confident entertainment” – with stars now.
Catherine Shuttleworth, retailer consultant and chief executive of Savvy Marketing, said Gap is also riding the wave of “positive sentiment” among millennial shoppers: “A lot of younger shoppers can remember having their clothes as kids. It has a nostalgia for them.”
But celebrities only go so far in wooing consumers. “[It’s] actually more about smaller influencers on TikTok repping the brands they love, or friends [wearing] Gap,” said Montgomery. This mirrors the place the brand used to have in young people’s wardrobes. Montgomery says: “When I was 13, I had the big logo Gap jumper – you bought it because your friends did.”
Vintage Gap is already on the radar of younger consumers – secondhand platform Depop reports that searches are up 81% since last June, with Gap denim up 138% since January.
The company has launched its own GapVintage range to bring old stock directly to customers.
Shuttleworth is interested to see if Gap will open more bricks-and-mortar stores. In the UK, Gap’s only high street presence is within other stores. Savvy Marketing’s research shows that 47% of 18-to 24-year-olds will use the high street more in the next few years compared with 37% across all age groups. “Younger shoppers never saw those shops. So when people like me say they were fantastic, they want to know what that fantastic thing was,” she said.
Though Gap’s heritage means nostalgia is a big part of its revival, there is some criticism of this strategy, with influential fashion writer Lauren Sherman recentlywriting in Puck magazine: “Gap can’t improve future sales by relying on tropes from the past.”
Speaking to Vogue Business last year, Gap’s chief executive said its focus was quality; something that has become more prized in this era of fast fashion. Dickson said: “We ensure we create enduring fashions that have a timelessness to them, even though they always reflect timely trends.”
Montgomery thinks that if the Gap renaissance is to continue, the brand should look to a newer high-street favourite for the next move: “Uniqlo has done what Gap should have done a long time ago. [It needs to] do basics really well and not diversify too much. If they can do thatand can keep offering the quality and range that people want, [they will succeed].”
Gap is not the only old favourite now making a comeback: last week, Topshop also announced a relaunch. It’s starting to feel like the 1990s all over again…
