The quest to fix the Gap? Can the iconic nineties retailer finally make a comeback and survive Tariffs? By Amandemul and lillly Meyer Read aloud by Mark Leedorf. When you're inside the GAP's headquarters, the grand Promise of California stretches out to the horizon in every direction. The building is situated on an almost unfathomably valuable patch of real estate near the foot of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, where between the building and the bridge, a giant bow and arrow sculpted by Klaus Oldenburg and Koshevan Brugen plunges down into the shore, as though an unseen goliath is taking aim at China through the center of the Earth. It was commissioned more than two decades ago by GAPS founders Doris and Donald Fisher, part public art, part de facto insurance policy for their company's panoramic view of the bay. On the afternoon of April second, as American retailers fretted privately over the tariff plan that President Donald Trump was due to unveil on a big, beautiful piece of foam board, this is the view that framed Richard Dixon in one of the company's conference rooms. Dixon is the company's fifth chief executive officer since retail legend Millard Mickey Drexler's ouster in two thousand and two, which precipitated a more than fifty percent revenue decline from a mighty seven point three billion dollars for its namesake brand since two thousand and three. He's also the only GAP CEO who, at this point in his tenure cannot be accurately described as embattled at a company that's been promising a return to glory for both shoppers and shareholders since the George W. Bush administration. The early results suggest a turnaround might finally be in the offing. As long as GAP can get its clothes right, wean the public off constant discounting, figure out what mall shoppers want from its stores, and claw its way back toward the top of the culture. No problem right. It was in this moment of opt that Dixon was waiting for a trade war's opening salvo to land. We have five percent market share in the American clothing market. There's plenty of business to go out and get even in a declining market. Even when people say, well, how's the consumer, the sentiment, the challenges, says Dixon, slender and tall and with a wardrobe full of studiedly unfussy Banana Republic sweaters and jeans. This year, it's tariffs. Next year it's something else, his voice rising in a nasal faux panic. The red sea, the blue sea, It's constant. That, of course, is what any ceo worth his compensation package is supposed to say in the minutes before a disaster of indeterminate magnitude is set to strike his industry. But in the moment, in the kind of setting that forces you to remember, gap can still marshal the resources of a great American company, not just the view but the walls lined with black and white ads showing some of the coolest people to ever live wearing clothes that decades ago changed global face. It seems almost reasonable. By the time we exited the conference room, though, the tariffs were real, real and bizarre, haphazard, onerous, seemingly designed to collapse as many US consumer businesses as possible. Dixon, he tells us several weeks later, had immediately gotten on the phone with the company's chief financial officer and its chief supply chain and transformation officer to start working through potential scenarios for dealing with a much different set of duties than the industry had anticipated. What if we increased production in the US? Why not, he asked, enumerting some of the possibilities on the table. What if we diversified our footprint even more? What if I went to the administration? Dixon and GAP's government affairs team traveled to Washington several times to do just that. They talked to tariffs both directly with Trump and with congressional leaders, and discussed the potential for store closures. The intent is good, but the reality of that of executing in our the category is limited, he says, referring to the quixotic task of bringing the garment and textile industries back to North America in any meaningful way. This type of tariff torment is hardly unique to GAP. Any company that sells physical goods has been forced to take a frantic look at its manufacturing, sourcing, and logistics operations and tried to triage. In GAP's case, that means hedging the retailer's import and product bets. And in its May earnings call, Dixon said the company aimed to diversify its overseas suppliers and ensure that no one country accounts for more than a quarter of its goods by the end of twenty twenty six. In fiscal twenty twenty four, Vietnam was the only country above that threshold, at about twenty seven percent. By the end of this year, Dixon said, imports from China, which as of twenty twenty four accounted for less than ten percent of GAPS assortment, will be reduced to less than three percent, and the company planned to double its sourcing of American grown cotton in twenty twenty six. This is one of those moments that is going to require more patients, which Dixon admits he doesn't always have. GAP has been getting more traction with shoppers of late, he says, but this is a factor that potentially, will you know, impact certain parts of our momentum. During the same earnings call, investors got a first look at what that impact might be. The retailer shared that it was expecting as much as three hundred million dollars in additional costs in the twenty twenty five fiscal year, though planned mitigation efforts should reduce that by up to one hundred and fifty million dollars. The remark sent the company's stock into freefall, ultimately down about twenty percent by the time the market opened the following day. Other retailers have issued similar warnings after pulling its guidance for the fiscal year. Earlier in May, American Eagle Outfitters, which has about a third of the annual revenue of GAP, said it expected around forty million dollars in teriff related costs. Abercrombie and Fish, similar in size to AEO, predicted a fifty million dollar hit. US clothing retailers have been in a state of decline for decades, Like plenty of others. From its nineteen nineties heyday, gaps rise and long humbling largely mirror the ascent and demise of the mid tier suburban mall. As foot traffic was disappearing. In the mid two thousands, the brand got battered from all sides. European fast fashion companies such as H and M, Target submitting itself as a force in affordable fashion, and uniclosed Japanese basics. But many of GAP's problems have been a self inflicted jumble of nonsensical resource drains, bad investments, and failed concepts. Piper Lime its attempted Zappo's competitor, shut down in twenty fifteen. In twenty twelve, Gap tried to get into the high end apparel market by buying the boutique chain Intermix, which went nowhere. Gap offloaded it to a private equity firm in twenty twenty one. Then there were the Great Yeasy Depical of twenty twenty two, in which a planned decade long collaboration with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West collapsed in a humiliating heap of ninety dollars hoodies. Through all these corporate side quests and quite frankly too many others to list, what suffered was the thing people actually wanted from Gap, the clothes. While the retailer was looking to join new markets, or clothes underperforming stores, or bulk up its e commerce operations, it seemed to forget that its core competency is or was, designing, cool, affordable, every day apparel. In the past year or so, the necessary cleanup of the company's finances and logistics operations seems to have finally paid off, just as the chain's clothes are starting to attract the attention of both teens on TikTok and the elder millennials nostalgic for GAP's golden age, who can actually afford eighty dollars genes at full price. If you squint, you can sort of see how a company like GAP might be well positioned to weather and perhaps even benefit from the kind of direct hit to the industry that the Trump administration has so far outlined. Closing the Deminimus exception, which waives tariffs on imports valued at eight hundred dollars or less, has given US clothing retailers some relief from the lowest price competition with Timu and Shine. Amazon, which relies on third party sellers, a significant portion of whom Er oversees, could suffer. Smaller, less resource rich American businesses are at real risk of getting gutted too. Meanwhile, Gap orders inventory at a scale that encourages its existing production partners, some of which the company says it's worked with for more than thirty years to prioritize its needs, and if it wants to find new production capacity elsewhere in countries with less of a tariff target on their back, it can box out most of its competition. It may be a business that's endured decades of missteps, failures, and contraction, but it's still bigger than the vast majority of companies selling similar products to US consumers Right now, Dixon just needs to make sure while steering all this that he can also capture the more intangible thing that's just as vital. We've been around for fifty five years, he says, and we want to be around fifty five more. That Gap still exists at all is itself a minor miracle. Brands don't have limitless lifespans, especially in an industry as fickle as fashion, and GAP's obituary has almost been written many times over the past decade. American's nostalgia for mall retailers hasn't helped many of them survive, most having faded into either obscurity or, more likely, bankruptcy court. The first Gap store was opened by the Fishers in the countercultural hotbed of nineteen sixty nine San Francisco, selling levies and records to the city's cool kids. In the following years, they opened dozens of stores and began developing their own low cost clothing lines. They took the company public in nineteen seventy six and eventually jettisoned the third party products in favour of their own. The next twenty five years were stunningly successful as a casualizing country turned to new suburban shopping malls, which sprang up as quickly as developers could get the stucco to set in search of jeans, khakis, and T shirts. That was thanks in large part to Drexler, whom the Fishers hired in nineteen eighty three. The same year, the company bought a Safari themed retailer named Banana Republic. Among other consequential decisions, Drexler cleared out the previous decade's private label experiments. Inside Gap, there would be only one brand. Informal but crisp, easy but traditional, preppy but not too preppy, the quintessential basics of American dressing. The clothes threaded a very tricky needle, satisfying mall shoppers while being cool enough for the fashion and entertainment elite. In nineteen ninety two, a gaggle of supermodels covered Vogues one hundredth anniversary issues swathed in the company's white jeans and button downs. Sharon Stone wore Gap pieces on the Oscar's red carpet. Twice. Meanwhile, GAP's ads became art in their own right, black and white photos by Herbritz, Annie Leibovitz, and Patrick de Marchillier featuring cultural icons such as Spike Lee and Joan Didion. Historical shots of Amelia Earhart and Muhammad Ali cleverly repurposed to sell Khakis TV commercials that felt more like music videos. A nineteen ninety eight profile in Fortune magazine speculated that Drexler just might be the most influential person in American fashion. Inside the company, though pressure was mounting from lower priced competition aping the GAP model, and a bloated fleet of aging stores was beginning to feel less hip. Drexler found some fixes, most notably launching the less expensive Old Navy, which buffered the company from the more aggressive discounters. Gap the brand might have lost those sales, but Gap the company kept the market share. The strategy has been effective beyond what anyone could have predicted. It took only a few years after its debut for Old Navy to reach one billion dollars in annual sales, and in the brand's most recent fiscal year, it brought in eight point four billion dollars compared with the Gap brand's three point three billion dollars. Even so, by two thousand and two, investors had grown restless and wanted new leadership. The company's financials were messy and debt laden, and sales had been declining for two years. Drexler was fired. The next year, Gap posted what are still its best sales numbers by selling the clothes that Drexler, by then CEO of j Crue, had ordered into production before being shown the door. Drexler declined to comment. The less that's said about what's transpired since the better Gaps had just a string of different leaders, like a revolving door of leadership. Mark Breitbard, who joined the company for the first time in nineteen ninety seven and in twenty twenty was named president and CEO of the Gap brand. This is where we acknowledge, not for the last time, that it's a little confusing that the company shares a name with one of its brands. Breitbard isn't quite a Gap lifer, but close over the years, tasked with some clean up at three of the company's four brands. The outlier is Athleta, the activewear line it acquired in two thousand and eight. In other words, he's seen some things. Gap had more fundamentals to fix, he says, broken international markets, stores that were unprofitable, SKU proliferation, lack of focus, lack of big ideas. Every time the company hired a CEO, it was with the promise each would solve a diagnosed problem, to bulk up the e commerce operation, to close stores, to get out of bad mall leases, to improve margins. After Drexler came Paul Presler, previously a Walt Disney theme park exec, who oversaw cost cuts and declining creativity. Next was Glenn Murphy, who'd previously run a Canadian drug store chain. He too was heralded as a cost cutter, and he implemented store closures and ultimately declines in product quality. The Murphy era had a few bright spots, such as a successful bet on colorful genes in the early twenty tens. He retired in twenty fifteen. Next, Art Peck, a former management consultant who, among other things, had been running GAP's digital division. He lasted until twenty nineteen, during which time he closed hundreds of stores and made the company even more reliant on discounting. In early March twenty twenty, came the unfortunately timed arrival of Sonya Single, previously the head of Old Navy, whose tenure was immediately thrown into chaos by the pandemic. She left in mid twenty twenty two. Presler defends his tenure emphasized as he accomplished what the board asked him to. Murphy Peck and Single didn't respond to requests for comment. Dixon's first encounter with Gap began when he was still fully enmeshed in Barbie Mania, unleashing one hundred brand deals or collaborations connected to the movie. After he'd worked a total of nearly two decades at Mattel, he was contacted to consider joining the GAP board. He was intrigued by the high stakes. I haven't been to a GAP in a really long time, and when I looked at it online, I was like, it's lost the narrative, and then of course when I looked at the business, it was really not good, says Dixon. For me, that was the draw. Pick me, pick me, I'll jump in the fire. He joined the board in twenty twenty two, just as the Yeasy collab imploded. By the following year, GAP was still looking for a CEO to replay single, and with the Barbie movie about to premiere, Dixon decided he was up for the Rehab job, even though he was a toy executive. The board was impressed with his combination of creativity and financial discipline, according to a person familiar with the process who asked not to be named because the matter was confidential. Yet, Dixon was hardly a stranger to apparel. He grew up in New York City with parents who were both in the fashion business. At one point, his father served as CFO at Calvin Kleine. His first job after college was at Bloomingdale's, where he broke her to deal with a group of the city's private schools to design a line of uniforms for students. He went on to co found and then sell a dot com era online cosmetics retailer, and become an executive at the apparel company Jones Group. Always with an eye toward branding, one of Dixon's first acts as GAP CEO was to take his new leadership team on a shopping trip to gap dot com. He wanted them to see with fresh eyes what bugged him about the experience, how discounting schemes sometimes several overlapping at once had usurped them close as the brand's focal point, which had been a problem for years. With the exception of that twenty tens big bet on brightly colored skinny jeans, it was hard to recall a single moment in the past couple of decades when GAP's clothes got people excited. Instead, the retailer relied on deep, constant discounts to keep mediocre clothes moving. You were like, I don't even see the product anymore because you're bombarding me with what looks like anxiety, Dixon says. As the company's new leader, he also noticed something askew among his staffers, an unrealistic culture of positivity. I sit in meetings and they're all telling me how great things are, and they're not, like they're just not great. So I'm fascinated at this culture that presents with such great positivity and optimism. But then you look at the business, you go to our stores, you go online, you hear the drum beat in the outside world, and they think very differently, says Dixon. At a town he presented all the negative headlines from the brand's recent press. I said, it's unbelievable everybody seems to know what to do but us, and you read the articles and they're not wrong. He wanted an environment where people felt compelled to identify failures, be honest about them, and move forward. I'm very transparent to the extent that it can be somewhat uncomfortable, he says externally. The biggest boost to the company's image in Dixon's earliest days came from a splashy hire, the February twenty twenty four appointment of designer Zach Posen. Posen, who rose to fame in the twenty tens on the strength of his red carpet gowns and his charm on project Runway, is now executive vice president and creative director for Gap, as well as chief creative officer at Old Navy. He joined a company that had brought in flashy creative heads, one poached from a French fashion house, another with minimalist Scandinavian cred only to then fire them or eliminate their roles entirely. So far, Posen's creative director title at Gap has caused confusion the press, crediting him for elements of both the company's and the Gap brand's overall performance. Even though he doesn't have much to do with the latter. His official corporate bio vaguely describes him as a cultural curator and creative partner to Dixon. In addition to the more straightforward design and product oversight duties you'd expect from Old Navy CCO, Posen's most obvious public role has been in celebrity relations, creating custom GAP branded looks for a listers, including a red carpet get up for Demi Moore and a met Gala look for Divine Joy Randolph. Asked about Posen's role, Dixon says he's bringing more design nerds into the company through his recruiting skill set, bringing more interesting people into the cultural conversation based on who he knows and how he navigates in the culture. He also says Posen's role has been a boon to GAPS marketing efforts. Posen wasn't made available to Bloomberg BusinessWeek for an interview, but we did see him at the company's Tribeca offices. Dressed like an old timey aviator. He smiled and waved as he passed our conference room. At Old Navy, Posen has overseen the release of a hit occasionware collection inexpensive party dresses and taffeta skirts with matching crop tops for when you don't want to spend two hundred and fifty dollars to attend a wedding, the development of which was already in progress when he joined the company. Where his esthetic influence is most visible, though, is at Gap Studio, a separate new line with a more fashioned, forward sensibility and slightly higher prices, where Posen has a design staff of his own. Its one collection so far features things such as corset belts and nipped waist trench dresses, as well as a reproduction of a virally popular off the shoulder shirt dress he created for Nn Hathaway to wear to a twenty twenty four Bulgary event in Rome. Received an uneven reception from critics and shoppers. The clothes, however, are not right, wrote Lauren Sherman of the first Gap Studio collection in line sheet her Puck newsletter on the fashion industry. Nobody wants a denim trench or a two purple navy blue bubble skirt, even if it's cute from the Gap. You know what they want a T shirt. Fetishize the T shirt. We'll be right back with the quest to Fix the Gap. Welcome back to the Quest to Fix the Gap. Baryl jeans, with their exaggerated curved legs that resemble a bow legged cartoon cowboy, are the opposite of an obvious crowd pleaser. If you walk into a Gap store now, the preponderance of Baryl jeans, along with their even more exaggerated sister look, the horseshoe gene, styled with everything from tiny tank tops to oversized Oxford's, should be your first hint that things are a little bit different to the brand. About a year ago, Gap finally rushed into a trend at the exact right moment for its shoppers. We had a barrel fit two years earlier that we tested, and it didn't test well because we were too early, says Gap president Breitbard. It worked okay in Japan, but it didn't work in the US. For years, Gap has had an uneasy relationship with fashion trends, either betting big on things that didn't end up catching on and then heavily discounting them, or not being able to get of the moment designs into stores quickly enough to capitalize on spiking interest. But with these genes Gap finally managed to capture a little bit of the magic it had at its peak, translating an edgy look into something approachable for a much wider swath of Americans. We kept playing with it, and when the trend was there, we were ready to go. Brightbard says. There was also an unexpected upside. Turns out, when you wear jeans that balloon out, you need to offset them with some snug new tops, which boosted the average order size when customers purchased baggy jeans. When Dixon arrived, some of the company's hard rehab work was well under way. Richard comes in and a lot of the heavy lift that's the ugly part, had been done, says Breitbard, adding that all the flames were embers ready for gas to be poured on them. I feel that that's Richard's strength, coming in and taking these ideas and just making things much bigger and more explosive. For years, one of Legacy Retailer's biggest challenges was their reliance on the old school fashion calendar, which required them to design and order products six months to a year in advance, leaving them flat footed in the face of fast fashion companies that could pounce on trends. Bright Bard changed that. Now, rather than being locked into designs, the brand chooses textiles early in the product development process, then waits as long as possible to decide which styles they'll be made into. Along with this newfound flexibility and speed, the company can also test smaller batches of products with real customers before committing to larger orders. Right now, it does feel like we're bringing back that esthetic intelligence, that voice of taste, says Calvin Leung, the brand's head of creative. Of course, telegraphing taste requires more than product. In twenty twenty three, Gap cast Venita Carter for the kind of photoshoot that's long been a signature, a spare portrait against a gray background. Dressed in baggy men's jeans, a gray hoodie layered over an oversized button down, and a logo trucker hat. She looked the part of the too cool GAP icon, But unlike her nineties predecessors, Carter isn't mainstream famous. She's a stylist and jewelry designer, mostly unknown to the public, but whose fashion world cred sent a sharp signal to taste makers who can get a Gap is back. Rumor going among their friends and followers. We were getting a lot of interesting questions from the right people about like, wait, what's happening, And that was before there was any big story. Brightbard says that growing buzz has also been aided by recent collabs with smaller culty brands in the past few years. That's included the zoomer beloved sweatshirt brand Mad Happy, the glam hippie women's label Cult Gaia, and Doan, a Los Angeles based label known for its feminine details and romantic sundresses. Gap reached out to Doen in twenty twenty three, before Dixon was elevated at the top spot. According to Doenn CEO Margaret Cleveland, who along with her co founder and sister, had formed their understanding of casual American fashion in GAP's heyday, we all were already following the Instagram Gap playlist accounts and obsessed with old Gap creative and campaigns and portraiture as part of our visual points of reference, she says, referring to popular social media accounts run by fans who come filed digital odes to the Gap of yore. If anyone at Doen had questioned GAP's reach after decades of shrinking sales, the collaboration's first release in May twenty twenty four ended those doubts. Many of the products, including a one hundred and fifty eight dollars islet embellished midi cotton dress, sold out in the first few days. Meanwhile, the La brand had its biggest day of web traffic ever, even though the co branded products were available only through Gaps sales channels. When the two brands paired up for a second drop this past May, Doan enjoyed its best ever sales week. And for Gap, you're driving traffic in relevance, but you're now driving new customers to be interested in your basic core proposition that probably weren't there before, says Dixon. Cleveland says the biggest change she's seen from the partnership is from women her age, mothers of young kids, who'd mostly seen GAP as a place to get adorable clothes for babies and toddlers and might not have bought anything for themselves there since college. Indeed, on Mother's Day, a young mom pushing an infant and a stroller on the sidewalk of a leafy Brooklyn neighborhood was spotted wearing both the Gap doan Ginghams shift dress and the matching chore jacket. Breitbard says that three years ago it was mostly GAP's executive team reaching out for collaborations. Now, he says, brands are largely coming to Gap first, but a multi billion dollar chain can't exist on collabs alone. Casey Lewis, a trend analyst and author of the after School Newsletter, which dissects Generation Z consumer behavior, says the clothes she's seen get the most traction among young shoppers is stuffed there discovering, and not necessarily from what Gap is advertising most widely. She mentions one fair Elish cardigan that made the rounds online last winter. It was not something that you would see in any of the Gap imagery, but it went super viral and sold out. She says, young people are finding these items, and they're digging for them, and they're posting about it. A few days after we spoke, Lewis had a quasi viral Gap moment of her own. She made a TikTok video about a linen Blend s court embroidered with little summer objects, a beach umbrella, a seashell, a pair of green fish. The clip now has more than three hundred thousand views, and the scurt sold out and was eventually re stocked. In February, New York Magazine's popular shopping recommendation site, The Strategist, declared a gapissance. Leandra Medine Cohen, a long time fashion influencer, sent out an edition of her newsletter proclaiming that gap is where it's at. The brand's buzzy commercial with white Lotus star Parker Posey prompted a round of press and Posen dressed Timothey chalameat the Internet's favorite celebrity in a custom gap studio look for the Academy Awards nominee dinner. Turning around a company with a half century plus of history, tens of thousands of employees, and more than fifteen billion dollars in annual revenue is by no means a straightforward proposition, But if you were going to try it, this is probably what you'd hope it looked like. Then, just a few weeks later, the tariff bomb went off. It brought with it a retail environment far shakier and more uncertain than when Dixon took the job. No one knows what the ever changing tariff regime will ultimately look like, or indeed whether it will ever actually cease changing, which can make planning to mitigate the extra costs financially risky. After that disastrous May earnings call, in which the company outlined how it planned to absorb some of the shock, Dixon held a town hall. He didn't seem phased by the two billion dollar drop in market cap, instead reassuring staff that the company had exceeded financial expectations. According to an employee who attended and asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak on the matter, Wall Street may have wanted even more growth, Dixon said, but everything was going according to plan. This was just some short term pain. The company has plenty of work to do within its own walls, in some cases literally, Most Gap stores still seem trapped in amber from at least a decade ago, with crowded racks and piles of clothing amid bright white lights and washes of blonde wood veneer. The flat Iron store in New York City is a little more modern, with gleaming white lacquer displays and clothes that aren't quite as clearly separated by gender as they've been in the past. The Flat Iron Space is also trialing features such as a denim bar, but so far the company hasn't committed to any particular improvements to its store fleet, and the ones it is testing aren't incredibly inventive. Cautious incrementalism at an uncertain financial moment for retailers may be justifiable, but it may also turn off the gap curious at a crucial moment in the company's revival, especially at still bustling high end malls, where new store designs beckon shoppers from every direction, then there are gaps other brands. Old Navy continues to be the company's workhorse over the years, having funded any number of boondoggles and misfires at its sister brands. The revenue as Old Navy does put it into a class of its own, along with Nike, says Simeon Siegel, a managing director and retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets. At Banana Republic, revenue has declined by more than a third from its twenty fourteen peak of about three billion dollars. Weeks after Dixon arrived in twenty twenty three, the brand launched a line of furniture and home decor be our Home, which he shut down the following fall. It had a lot of flaws behind the scenes, and part of that flaw was the recognition that we had an apparel business that wasn't healthy, he says. Dixon has been running Banana Republic for more than a year following the departure of its CEO, who was hired for her expertise in home goods. The company's smallest brand and a once high growth corporate Darling has also stalled out. Part of the issue is that Athleta's premium prices force it to compete directly with trendier athleisure upstarts such as Alo Yoga and category leaders like Lululemon Athletica, but some of the competition is coming from in house. Old Navy's own low priced line of gym clothes has quietly been beating its corporate sister brand at its own game with products designed to satisfy similar esthetic and performance needs. Rumors have abounded that Gap might ultimately offload Athleta, though the company says it has no plans to sell the brand at this time. At the Gap, brand executives have seen turnaround signs they like sales growth from younger shoppers, the return of customers who'd strayed, and people buying things without a discount. Of course, an undeniable element of its current good fortune is the trend cycle. Looser baggiar jeans have lifted the performance, at least temporarily, of a number of brands associated with earlier eras of denim, including both Gap and Levi's. Other trends, oversized button downs linen hoodies have also bolstered interest in the kinds of clothes that have always been quintessentially Gap peak nostalgia hasn't exactly hurt either. Gen Z has an obsession with clothes from the late nineties and early two thousands, which has helped fuel comebacks at a handful of Gaps contemporaries, including Abercrombie and Coach. To capitalize on the moment, Gap has enlisted the designer and streetwear collector Sean Waterspoon to curate limited releases of the brand's decades old designs, which have so far all sold out. If after all these years, the Gap brand can finally execute a comeback, it could be well positioned for a tariffed apparel landscape if prices go up and consumers are forced to buy less, or perhaps if some ultra cheap products disappear from the country's market entirely, some shoppers will look look for better quality options and more versatile pieces. Gap has already started signaling to polyester wary customers that its clothes are often an upgrade, noting in product names when its sweaters are one hundred percent cotton, a linen blend, or cashmere. In some ways, though, that means the pressure to pull this off is all the more acute. If GAP, with its decades of iconography and near boundless goodwill among shoppers, can't get it together this time, when the country is already demanding jeans and button downs and hoodies, then what's any of this for. In that way, the greatest product of Dixon's tenure so far isn't a pair of jeenes or a collab. It's the ever more widespread belief that maybe GAP isn't dead after all.

The quest to fix the Gap? Can the iconic nineties retailer finally make a comeback and survive Tariffs? By Amandemul and lillly Meyer Read aloud by Mark Leedorf. When you're inside the GAP's headquarters, the grand Promise of California stretches out to the horizon in every direction. The building is situated on an almost unfathomably valuable patch of real estate near the foot of the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, where between the building and the bridge, a giant bow and arrow sculpted by Klaus Oldenburg and Koshevan Brugen plunges down into the shore, as though an unseen goliath is taking aim at China through the center of the Earth. It was commissioned more than two decades ago by GAPS founders Doris and Donald Fisher, part public art, part de facto insurance policy for their company's panoramic view of the bay. On the afternoon of April second, as American retailers fretted privately over the tariff plan that President Donald Trump was due to unveil on a big, beautiful piece of foam board, this is the view that framed Richard Dixon in one of the company's conference rooms. Dixon is the company's fifth chief executive officer since retail legend Millard Mickey Drexler's ouster in two thousand and two, which precipitated a more than fifty percent revenue decline from a mighty seven point three billion dollars for its namesake brand since two thousand and three. He's also the only GAP CEO who, at this point in his tenure cannot be accurately described as embattled at a company that's been promising a return to glory for both shoppers and shareholders since the George W. Bush administration. The early results suggest a turnaround might finally be in the offing. As long as GAP can get its clothes right, wean the public off constant discounting, figure out what mall shoppers want from its stores, and claw its way back toward the top of the culture. No problem right. It was in this moment of opt that Dixon was waiting for a trade war's opening salvo to land. We have five percent market share in the American clothing market. There's plenty of business to go out and get even in a declining market. Even when people say, well, how's the consumer, the sentiment, the challenges, says Dixon, slender and tall and with a wardrobe full of studiedly unfussy Banana Republic sweaters and jeans. This year, it's tariffs. Next year it's something else, his voice rising in a nasal faux panic. The red sea, the blue sea, It's constant. That, of course, is what any ceo worth his compensation package is supposed to say in the minutes before a disaster of indeterminate magnitude is set to strike his industry. But in the moment, in the kind of setting that forces you to remember, gap can still marshal the resources of a great American company, not just the view but the walls lined with black and white ads showing some of the coolest people to ever live wearing clothes that decades ago changed global face. It seems almost reasonable. By the time we exited the conference room, though, the tariffs were real, real and bizarre, haphazard, onerous, seemingly designed to collapse as many US consumer businesses as possible. Dixon, he tells us several weeks later, had immediately gotten on the phone with the company's chief financial officer and its chief supply chain and transformation officer to start working through potential scenarios for dealing with a much different set of duties than the industry had anticipated. What if we increased production in the US? Why not, he asked, enumerting some of the possibilities on the table. What if we diversified our footprint even more? What if I went to the administration? Dixon and GAP's government affairs team traveled to Washington several times to do just that. They talked to tariffs both directly with Trump and with congressional leaders, and discussed the potential for store closures. The intent is good, but the reality of that of executing in our the category is limited, he says, referring to the quixotic task of bringing the garment and textile industries back to North America in any meaningful way. This type of tariff torment is hardly unique to GAP. Any company that sells physical goods has been forced to take a frantic look at its manufacturing, sourcing, and logistics operations and tried to triage. In GAP's case, that means hedging the retailer's import and product bets. And in its May earnings call, Dixon said the company aimed to diversify its overseas suppliers and ensure that no one country accounts for more than a quarter of its goods by the end of twenty twenty six. In fiscal twenty twenty four, Vietnam was the only country above that threshold, at about twenty seven percent. By the end of this year, Dixon said, imports from China, which as of twenty twenty four accounted for less than ten percent of GAPS assortment, will be reduced to less than three percent, and the company planned to double its sourcing of American grown cotton in twenty twenty six. This is one of those moments that is going to require more patients, which Dixon admits he doesn't always have. GAP has been getting more traction with shoppers of late, he says, but this is a factor that potentially, will you know, impact certain parts of our momentum. During the same earnings call, investors got a first look at what that impact might be. The retailer shared that it was expecting as much as three hundred million dollars in additional costs in the twenty twenty five fiscal year, though planned mitigation efforts should reduce that by up to one hundred and fifty million dollars. The remark sent the company's stock into freefall, ultimately down about twenty percent by the time the market opened the following day. Other retailers have issued similar warnings after pulling its guidance for the fiscal year. Earlier in May, American Eagle Outfitters, which has about a third of the annual revenue of GAP, said it expected around forty million dollars in teriff related costs. Abercrombie and Fish, similar in size to AEO, predicted a fifty million dollar hit. US clothing retailers have been in a state of decline for decades, Like plenty of others. From its nineteen nineties heyday, gaps rise and long humbling largely mirror the ascent and demise of the mid tier suburban mall. As foot traffic was disappearing. In the mid two thousands, the brand got battered from all sides. European fast fashion companies such as H and M, Target submitting itself as a force in affordable fashion, and uniclosed Japanese basics. But many of GAP's problems have been a self inflicted jumble of nonsensical resource drains, bad investments, and failed concepts. Piper Lime its attempted Zappo's competitor, shut down in twenty fifteen. In twenty twelve, Gap tried to get into the high end apparel market by buying the boutique chain Intermix, which went nowhere. Gap offloaded it to a private equity firm in twenty twenty one. Then there were the Great Yeasy Depical of twenty twenty two, in which a planned decade long collaboration with the rapper formerly known as Kanye West collapsed in a humiliating heap of ninety dollars hoodies. Through all these corporate side quests and quite frankly too many others to list, what suffered was the thing people actually wanted from Gap, the clothes. While the retailer was looking to join new markets, or clothes underperforming stores, or bulk up its e commerce operations, it seemed to forget that its core competency is or was, designing, cool, affordable, every day apparel. In the past year or so, the necessary cleanup of the company's finances and logistics operations seems to have finally paid off, just as the chain's clothes are starting to attract the attention of both teens on TikTok and the elder millennials nostalgic for GAP's golden age, who can actually afford eighty dollars genes at full price. If you squint, you can sort of see how a company like GAP might be well positioned to weather and perhaps even benefit from the kind of direct hit to the industry that the Trump administration has so far outlined. Closing the Deminimus exception, which waives tariffs on imports valued at eight hundred dollars or less, has given US clothing retailers some relief from the lowest price competition with Timu and Shine. Amazon, which relies on third party sellers, a significant portion of whom Er oversees, could suffer. Smaller, less resource rich American businesses are at real risk of getting gutted too. Meanwhile, Gap orders inventory at a scale that encourages its existing production partners, some of which the company says it's worked with for more than thirty years to prioritize its needs, and if it wants to find new production capacity elsewhere in countries with less of a tariff target on their back, it can box out most of its competition. It may be a business that's endured decades of missteps, failures, and contraction, but it's still bigger than the vast majority of companies selling similar products to US consumers Right now, Dixon just needs to make sure while steering all this that he can also capture the more intangible thing that's just as vital. We've been around for fifty five years, he says, and we want to be around fifty five more. That Gap still exists at all is itself a minor miracle. Brands don't have limitless lifespans, especially in an industry as fickle as fashion, and GAP's obituary has almost been written many times over the past decade. American's nostalgia for mall retailers hasn't helped many of them survive, most having faded into either obscurity or, more likely, bankruptcy court. The first Gap store was opened by the Fishers in the countercultural hotbed of nineteen sixty nine San Francisco, selling levies and records to the city's cool kids. In the following years, they opened dozens of stores and began developing their own low cost clothing lines. They took the company public in nineteen seventy six and eventually jettisoned the third party products in favour of their own. The next twenty five years were stunningly successful as a casualizing country turned to new suburban shopping malls, which sprang up as quickly as developers could get the stucco to set in search of jeans, khakis, and T shirts. That was thanks in large part to Drexler, whom the Fishers hired in nineteen eighty three. The same year, the company bought a Safari themed retailer named Banana Republic. Among other consequential decisions, Drexler cleared out the previous decade's private label experiments. Inside Gap, there would be only one brand. Informal but crisp, easy but traditional, preppy but not too preppy, the quintessential basics of American dressing. The clothes threaded a very tricky needle, satisfying mall shoppers while being cool enough for the fashion and entertainment elite. In nineteen ninety two, a gaggle of supermodels covered Vogues one hundredth anniversary issues swathed in the company's white jeans and button downs. Sharon Stone wore Gap pieces on the Oscar's red carpet. Twice. Meanwhile, GAP's ads became art in their own right, black and white photos by Herbritz, Annie Leibovitz, and Patrick de Marchillier featuring cultural icons such as Spike Lee and Joan Didion. Historical shots of Amelia Earhart and Muhammad Ali cleverly repurposed to sell Khakis TV commercials that felt more like music videos. A nineteen ninety eight profile in Fortune magazine speculated that Drexler just might be the most influential person in American fashion. Inside the company, though pressure was mounting from lower priced competition aping the GAP model, and a bloated fleet of aging stores was beginning to feel less hip. Drexler found some fixes, most notably launching the less expensive Old Navy, which buffered the company from the more aggressive discounters. Gap the brand might have lost those sales, but Gap the company kept the market share. The strategy has been effective beyond what anyone could have predicted. It took only a few years after its debut for Old Navy to reach one billion dollars in annual sales, and in the brand's most recent fiscal year, it brought in eight point four billion dollars compared with the Gap brand's three point three billion dollars. Even so, by two thousand and two, investors had grown restless and wanted new leadership. The company's financials were messy and debt laden, and sales had been declining for two years. Drexler was fired. The next year, Gap posted what are still its best sales numbers by selling the clothes that Drexler, by then CEO of j Crue, had ordered into production before being shown the door. Drexler declined to comment. The less that's said about what's transpired since the better Gaps had just a string of different leaders, like a revolving door of leadership. Mark Breitbard, who joined the company for the first time in nineteen ninety seven and in twenty twenty was named president and CEO of the Gap brand. This is where we acknowledge, not for the last time, that it's a little confusing that the company shares a name with one of its brands. Breitbard isn't quite a Gap lifer, but close over the years, tasked with some clean up at three of the company's four brands. The outlier is Athleta, the activewear line it acquired in two thousand and eight. In other words, he's seen some things. Gap had more fundamentals to fix, he says, broken international markets, stores that were unprofitable, SKU proliferation, lack of focus, lack of big ideas. Every time the company hired a CEO, it was with the promise each would solve a diagnosed problem, to bulk up the e commerce operation, to close stores, to get out of bad mall leases, to improve margins. After Drexler came Paul Presler, previously a Walt Disney theme park exec, who oversaw cost cuts and declining creativity. Next was Glenn Murphy, who'd previously run a Canadian drug store chain. He too was heralded as a cost cutter, and he implemented store closures and ultimately declines in product quality. The Murphy era had a few bright spots, such as a successful bet on colorful genes in the early twenty tens. He retired in twenty fifteen. Next, Art Peck, a former management consultant who, among other things, had been running GAP's digital division. He lasted until twenty nineteen, during which time he closed hundreds of stores and made the company even more reliant on discounting. In early March twenty twenty, came the unfortunately timed arrival of Sonya Single, previously the head of Old Navy, whose tenure was immediately thrown into chaos by the pandemic. She left in mid twenty twenty two. Presler defends his tenure emphasized as he accomplished what the board asked him to. Murphy Peck and Single didn't respond to requests for comment. Dixon's first encounter with Gap began when he was still fully enmeshed in Barbie Mania, unleashing one hundred brand deals or collaborations connected to the movie. After he'd worked a total of nearly two decades at Mattel, he was contacted to consider joining the GAP board. He was intrigued by the high stakes. I haven't been to a GAP in a really long time, and when I looked at it online, I was like, it's lost the narrative, and then of course when I looked at the business, it was really not good, says Dixon. For me, that was the draw. Pick me, pick me, I'll jump in the fire. He joined the board in twenty twenty two, just as the Yeasy collab imploded. By the following year, GAP was still looking for a CEO to replay single, and with the Barbie movie about to premiere, Dixon decided he was up for the Rehab job, even though he was a toy executive. The board was impressed with his combination of creativity and financial discipline, according to a person familiar with the process who asked not to be named because the matter was confidential. Yet, Dixon was hardly a stranger to apparel. He grew up in New York City with parents who were both in the fashion business. At one point, his father served as CFO at Calvin Kleine. His first job after college was at Bloomingdale's, where he broke her to deal with a group of the city's private schools to design a line of uniforms for students. He went on to co found and then sell a dot com era online cosmetics retailer, and become an executive at the apparel company Jones Group. Always with an eye toward branding, one of Dixon's first acts as GAP CEO was to take his new leadership team on a shopping trip to gap dot com. He wanted them to see with fresh eyes what bugged him about the experience, how discounting schemes sometimes several overlapping at once had usurped them close as the brand's focal point, which had been a problem for years. With the exception of that twenty tens big bet on brightly colored skinny jeans, it was hard to recall a single moment in the past couple of decades when GAP's clothes got people excited. Instead, the retailer relied on deep, constant discounts to keep mediocre clothes moving. You were like, I don't even see the product anymore because you're bombarding me with what looks like anxiety, Dixon says. As the company's new leader, he also noticed something askew among his staffers, an unrealistic culture of positivity. I sit in meetings and they're all telling me how great things are, and they're not, like they're just not great. So I'm fascinated at this culture that presents with such great positivity and optimism. But then you look at the business, you go to our stores, you go online, you hear the drum beat in the outside world, and they think very differently, says Dixon. At a town he presented all the negative headlines from the brand's recent press. I said, it's unbelievable everybody seems to know what to do but us, and you read the articles and they're not wrong. He wanted an environment where people felt compelled to identify failures, be honest about them, and move forward. I'm very transparent to the extent that it can be somewhat uncomfortable, he says externally. The biggest boost to the company's image in Dixon's earliest days came from a splashy hire, the February twenty twenty four appointment of designer Zach Posen. Posen, who rose to fame in the twenty tens on the strength of his red carpet gowns and his charm on project Runway, is now executive vice president and creative director for Gap, as well as chief creative officer at Old Navy. He joined a company that had brought in flashy creative heads, one poached from a French fashion house, another with minimalist Scandinavian cred only to then fire them or eliminate their roles entirely. So far, Posen's creative director title at Gap has caused confusion the press, crediting him for elements of both the company's and the Gap brand's overall performance. Even though he doesn't have much to do with the latter. His official corporate bio vaguely describes him as a cultural curator and creative partner to Dixon. In addition to the more straightforward design and product oversight duties you'd expect from Old Navy CCO, Posen's most obvious public role has been in celebrity relations, creating custom GAP branded looks for a listers, including a red carpet get up for Demi Moore and a met Gala look for Divine Joy Randolph. Asked about Posen's role, Dixon says he's bringing more design nerds into the company through his recruiting skill set, bringing more interesting people into the cultural conversation based on who he knows and how he navigates in the culture. He also says Posen's role has been a boon to GAPS marketing efforts. Posen wasn't made available to Bloomberg BusinessWeek for an interview, but we did see him at the company's Tribeca offices. Dressed like an old timey aviator. He smiled and waved as he passed our conference room. At Old Navy, Posen has overseen the release of a hit occasionware collection inexpensive party dresses and taffeta skirts with matching crop tops for when you don't want to spend two hundred and fifty dollars to attend a wedding, the development of which was already in progress when he joined the company. Where his esthetic influence is most visible, though, is at Gap Studio, a separate new line with a more fashioned, forward sensibility and slightly higher prices, where Posen has a design staff of his own. Its one collection so far features things such as corset belts and nipped waist trench dresses, as well as a reproduction of a virally popular off the shoulder shirt dress he created for Nn Hathaway to wear to a twenty twenty four Bulgary event in Rome. Received an uneven reception from critics and shoppers. The clothes, however, are not right, wrote Lauren Sherman of the first Gap Studio collection in line sheet her Puck newsletter on the fashion industry. Nobody wants a denim trench or a two purple navy blue bubble skirt, even if it's cute from the Gap. You know what they want a T shirt. Fetishize the T shirt. We'll be right back with the quest to Fix the Gap. Welcome back to the Quest to Fix the Gap. Baryl jeans, with their exaggerated curved legs that resemble a bow legged cartoon cowboy, are the opposite of an obvious crowd pleaser. If you walk into a Gap store now, the preponderance of Baryl jeans, along with their even more exaggerated sister look, the horseshoe gene, styled with everything from tiny tank tops to oversized Oxford's, should be your first hint that things are a little bit different to the brand. About a year ago, Gap finally rushed into a trend at the exact right moment for its shoppers. We had a barrel fit two years earlier that we tested, and it didn't test well because we were too early, says Gap president Breitbard. It worked okay in Japan, but it didn't work in the US. For years, Gap has had an uneasy relationship with fashion trends, either betting big on things that didn't end up catching on and then heavily discounting them, or not being able to get of the moment designs into stores quickly enough to capitalize on spiking interest. But with these genes Gap finally managed to capture a little bit of the magic it had at its peak, translating an edgy look into something approachable for a much wider swath of Americans. We kept playing with it, and when the trend was there, we were ready to go. Brightbard says. There was also an unexpected upside. Turns out, when you wear jeans that balloon out, you need to offset them with some snug new tops, which boosted the average order size when customers purchased baggy jeans. When Dixon arrived, some of the company's hard rehab work was well under way. Richard comes in and a lot of the heavy lift that's the ugly part, had been done, says Breitbard, adding that all the flames were embers ready for gas to be poured on them. I feel that that's Richard's strength, coming in and taking these ideas and just making things much bigger and more explosive. For years, one of Legacy Retailer's biggest challenges was their reliance on the old school fashion calendar, which required them to design and order products six months to a year in advance, leaving them flat footed in the face of fast fashion companies that could pounce on trends. Bright Bard changed that. Now, rather than being locked into designs, the brand chooses textiles early in the product development process, then waits as long as possible to decide which styles they'll be made into. Along with this newfound flexibility and speed, the company can also test smaller batches of products with real customers before committing to larger orders. Right now, it does feel like we're bringing back that esthetic intelligence, that voice of taste, says Calvin Leung, the brand's head of creative. Of course, telegraphing taste requires more than product. In twenty twenty three, Gap cast Venita Carter for the kind of photoshoot that's long been a signature, a spare portrait against a gray background. Dressed in baggy men's jeans, a gray hoodie layered over an oversized button down, and a logo trucker hat. She looked the part of the too cool GAP icon, But unlike her nineties predecessors, Carter isn't mainstream famous. She's a stylist and jewelry designer, mostly unknown to the public, but whose fashion world cred sent a sharp signal to taste makers who can get a Gap is back. Rumor going among their friends and followers. We were getting a lot of interesting questions from the right people about like, wait, what's happening, And that was before there was any big story. Brightbard says that growing buzz has also been aided by recent collabs with smaller culty brands in the past few years. That's included the zoomer beloved sweatshirt brand Mad Happy, the glam hippie women's label Cult Gaia, and Doan, a Los Angeles based label known for its feminine details and romantic sundresses. Gap reached out to Doen in twenty twenty three, before Dixon was elevated at the top spot. According to Doenn CEO Margaret Cleveland, who along with her co founder and sister, had formed their understanding of casual American fashion in GAP's heyday, we all were already following the Instagram Gap playlist accounts and obsessed with old Gap creative and campaigns and portraiture as part of our visual points of reference, she says, referring to popular social media accounts run by fans who come filed digital odes to the Gap of yore. If anyone at Doen had questioned GAP's reach after decades of shrinking sales, the collaboration's first release in May twenty twenty four ended those doubts. Many of the products, including a one hundred and fifty eight dollars islet embellished midi cotton dress, sold out in the first few days. Meanwhile, the La brand had its biggest day of web traffic ever, even though the co branded products were available only through Gaps sales channels. When the two brands paired up for a second drop this past May, Doan enjoyed its best ever sales week. And for Gap, you're driving traffic in relevance, but you're now driving new customers to be interested in your basic core proposition that probably weren't there before, says Dixon. Cleveland says the biggest change she's seen from the partnership is from women her age, mothers of young kids, who'd mostly seen GAP as a place to get adorable clothes for babies and toddlers and might not have bought anything for themselves there since college. Indeed, on Mother's Day, a young mom pushing an infant and a stroller on the sidewalk of a leafy Brooklyn neighborhood was spotted wearing both the Gap doan Ginghams shift dress and the matching chore jacket. Breitbard says that three years ago it was mostly GAP's executive team reaching out for collaborations. Now, he says, brands are largely coming to Gap first, but a multi billion dollar chain can't exist on collabs alone. Casey Lewis, a trend analyst and author of the after School Newsletter, which dissects Generation Z consumer behavior, says the clothes she's seen get the most traction among young shoppers is stuffed there discovering, and not necessarily from what Gap is advertising most widely. She mentions one fair Elish cardigan that made the rounds online last winter. It was not something that you would see in any of the Gap imagery, but it went super viral and sold out. She says, young people are finding these items, and they're digging for them, and they're posting about it. A few days after we spoke, Lewis had a quasi viral Gap moment of her own. She made a TikTok video about a linen Blend s court embroidered with little summer objects, a beach umbrella, a seashell, a pair of green fish. The clip now has more than three hundred thousand views, and the scurt sold out and was eventually re stocked. In February, New York Magazine's popular shopping recommendation site, The Strategist, declared a gapissance. Leandra Medine Cohen, a long time fashion influencer, sent out an edition of her newsletter proclaiming that gap is where it's at. The brand's buzzy commercial with white Lotus star Parker Posey prompted a round of press and Posen dressed Timothey chalameat the Internet's favorite celebrity in a custom gap studio look for the Academy Awards nominee dinner. Turning around a company with a half century plus of history, tens of thousands of employees, and more than fifteen billion dollars in annual revenue is by no means a straightforward proposition, But if you were going to try it, this is probably what you'd hope it looked like. Then, just a few weeks later, the tariff bomb went off. It brought with it a retail environment far shakier and more uncertain than when Dixon took the job. No one knows what the ever changing tariff regime will ultimately look like, or indeed whether it will ever actually cease changing, which can make planning to mitigate the extra costs financially risky. After that disastrous May earnings call, in which the company outlined how it planned to absorb some of the shock, Dixon held a town hall. He didn't seem phased by the two billion dollar drop in market cap, instead reassuring staff that the company had exceeded financial expectations. According to an employee who attended and asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak on the matter, Wall Street may have wanted even more growth, Dixon said, but everything was going according to plan. This was just some short term pain. The company has plenty of work to do within its own walls, in some cases literally, Most Gap stores still seem trapped in amber from at least a decade ago, with crowded racks and piles of clothing amid bright white lights and washes of blonde wood veneer. The flat Iron store in New York City is a little more modern, with gleaming white lacquer displays and clothes that aren't quite as clearly separated by gender as they've been in the past. The Flat Iron Space is also trialing features such as a denim bar, but so far the company hasn't committed to any particular improvements to its store fleet, and the ones it is testing aren't incredibly inventive. Cautious incrementalism at an uncertain financial moment for retailers may be justifiable, but it may also turn off the gap curious at a crucial moment in the company's revival, especially at still bustling high end malls, where new store designs beckon shoppers from every direction, then there are gaps other brands. Old Navy continues to be the company's workhorse over the years, having funded any number of boondoggles and misfires at its sister brands. The revenue as Old Navy does put it into a class of its own, along with Nike, says Simeon Siegel, a managing director and retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets. At Banana Republic, revenue has declined by more than a third from its twenty fourteen peak of about three billion dollars. Weeks after Dixon arrived in twenty twenty three, the brand launched a line of furniture and home decor be our Home, which he shut down the following fall. It had a lot of flaws behind the scenes, and part of that flaw was the recognition that we had an apparel business that wasn't healthy, he says. Dixon has been running Banana Republic for more than a year following the departure of its CEO, who was hired for her expertise in home goods. The company's smallest brand and a once high growth corporate Darling has also stalled out. Part of the issue is that Athleta's premium prices force it to compete directly with trendier athleisure upstarts such as Alo Yoga and category leaders like Lululemon Athletica, but some of the competition is coming from in house. Old Navy's own low priced line of gym clothes has quietly been beating its corporate sister brand at its own game with products designed to satisfy similar esthetic and performance needs. Rumors have abounded that Gap might ultimately offload Athleta, though the company says it has no plans to sell the brand at this time. At the Gap, brand executives have seen turnaround signs they like sales growth from younger shoppers, the return of customers who'd strayed, and people buying things without a discount. Of course, an undeniable element of its current good fortune is the trend cycle. Looser baggiar jeans have lifted the performance, at least temporarily, of a number of brands associated with earlier eras of denim, including both Gap and Levi's. Other trends, oversized button downs linen hoodies have also bolstered interest in the kinds of clothes that have always been quintessentially Gap peak nostalgia hasn't exactly hurt either. Gen Z has an obsession with clothes from the late nineties and early two thousands, which has helped fuel comebacks at a handful of Gaps contemporaries, including Abercrombie and Coach. To capitalize on the moment, Gap has enlisted the designer and streetwear collector Sean Waterspoon to curate limited releases of the brand's decades old designs, which have so far all sold out. If after all these years, the Gap brand can finally execute a comeback, it could be well positioned for a tariffed apparel landscape if prices go up and consumers are forced to buy less, or perhaps if some ultra cheap products disappear from the country's market entirely, some shoppers will look look for better quality options and more versatile pieces. Gap has already started signaling to polyester wary customers that its clothes are often an upgrade, noting in product names when its sweaters are one hundred percent cotton, a linen blend, or cashmere. In some ways, though, that means the pressure to pull this off is all the more acute. If GAP, with its decades of iconography and near boundless goodwill among shoppers, can't get it together this time, when the country is already demanding jeans and button downs and hoodies, then what's any of this for. In that way, the greatest product of Dixon's tenure so far isn't a pair of jeenes or a collab. It's the ever more widespread belief that maybe GAP isn't dead after all.