
House of Z makes me feel severely underdressed.
The rise, fall, and re-rise of a modern fashion icon.
I’m a bit of a sneakerhead, but outside of that I’m not much of a fashionista. And definitely not high/runway fashion. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the type to sneer at the spectacle of it all. I’ve been to a couple of shows and have a lot of respect for the art form. But it just isn’t my scene.
So I’m not kidding when I say that House of Z is one of my favourite films out of the New Zealand International Film Festival.
House of Z is a documentary directed by Sandy Chronopoulos about Zac Posen, a young fashion designer who made a huge splash on the scene in the mid-00s. Still in his early 20s, his work showed a remarkable level of craft, vision, and flair. He immediately became a wunderkind. Zac graced the cover of Vogue on multiple occasions, he was seen at all the best parties, and crowds clamoured to be at his shows.
But a combination of pressure, overreach, and the ’08-’09 Global Financial Crisis caused his star to fall. Almost overnight the press stopped talking about him as the darling of the New York fashion scene, and instead labelled a Zoolander-like caricature. A disastrous attempt to break into the Paris scene and his company breaking apart sealed it — he was done.
Zac returns to New York to put on a small, intimate runway show, in a last ditch effort to show the world that he’s the real deal.

A lot of documentaries of this ilk just assume that you’re interested in the subject from the moment the film starts. But House of Z does a fantastic job of bringing you in, one stitch at a time. By starting from Zac at a young age — making dresses out of toys from scraps of fabric he finds — we’re with him as he develops his passion. Then when everything goes glitz and glamour and runways, we’re as excited by it as he is.
The movie pulls together a wide swathe of models, designers, and other people from Zac’s life to tell his story. Zac’s entire family are present throughout the film, and talk openly about the highs and lows of being with him through his career.
Even Paz de la Huerta, a former It Girl who has been making a habit of popping up unexpectedly in recent documentaries, turns up. More recently she “hijacked” Louis Theroux’s Scientology documentary. And she appears in the early parts of House of Z, though this time it makes a lot more sense — de la Huerta was a model who spent time in the art school Zac went to.
But the best person to tell the story of Zac Posen is Zac himself. The most compelling parts of House of Z are the candid, present-day interviews with Zac. He comes across as a fella who has learnt the hard way. Someone who is keen to prove that they weren’t handed their achievements on a silver platter. And he’s not going to prove it through interviews, or photo ops, or PR fluff — he’s going to god damn work for it.
It’s during his comeback show that we finally see Zac at work from woe to go. And all of the over-the-top try-hard stuff he was doing in Paris melts away.
House of Z isn’t a story about fashion. It’s a story about losing yourself creatively, and then finding yourself again.

