Zac Posen has designed the first authorized costume redesign for Jerome Robbins' "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz," creating the wardrobe for Miami City Ballet through GapStudio. Invited by The Robbins Rights Trust and the company, Posen rebuilt the 1958 ballet's everyday wardrobe with denim, hoodies, button-down shirts and T-shirts, drawing on Gap's casual clothing and adapting it for the stage.
Zac Posen Reimagines a Classic: GapStudio's Debut with Miami City Ballet
The project, announced ahead of the company's first performances of the work, pairs a mass-market American wardrobe with classical dance. Posen, executive vice president and creative director of Gap Inc., created the costumes through GapStudio, the brand's design studio, drawing on its fall 2026 collection. Each of the ballet's 16 dancers receives a distinct look, an approach that treats costume as characterization rather than uniform. The collaboration extends beyond the theater through a campaign directed by two-time Emmy Award winner Ezra Hurwitz, shot in Miami with the company's dancers.
The Original Vision: "Ballet in Sneakers"
When "N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz" premiered in 1958, Robbins did something then considered radical: he put ballet dancers in sneakers. The costumes were the clothes of ordinary American youth — T-shirts, sneakers, casual separates — and the choreography captured the energy of young people in New York City. What read in 1958 as a provocation against ballet's formal conventions has, over decades, become part of the work's identity. Posen's redesign does not discard that founding gesture; it asks what the everyday wardrobe of American youth looks like nearly seventy years later.
