One office of the fashion brand Lingua Franca is in a warren of spaces below the Jane Hotel, where Diane Jaffe, an embroiderer, is working on a white sweater with we the people stitched in red and blue thread that will sell for $380.
Lingua Franca’s founder, Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, is sitting in a room to the side that’s separated by French doors, picking at a hamburger and talking about how she started craving meat during her pregnancy. She has tousled blonde hair and is wearing wide-legged jeans, a Comme des Garçons Play T-shirt, and a charm necklace. She exudes jittery warmth.
“I had crazy postpartum anxiety—I’m now proudly medicated—and my therapist said to try doing something with my hands,” she says of the brand’s origin story. “And I thought, Well, Grandma Rita taught me to embroider.” At the time, Hruska MacPherson was running the party website Guest of a Guest, which she’d founded in 2007. That weekend, in February 2016, she was in Montauk and followed her therapist’s advice by embroidering booyah on an old cashmere sweater. She posted a photo on Instagram.
A flood of requests came from friends and family and strangers for their own sweaters with hip-hop lyrics and references embroidered on them. And soon she started selling vintage sweaters she’d bought off eBay emblazoned with I miss biggie, among other sayings, out of the Crow’s Nest in Montauk. Leonardo DiCaprio bought one for whomever he was dating at the time that read original gangsta. Hruska MacPherson and her husband, the hotelier Sean MacPherson (who owns the Crow’s Nest and co-owns the Jane Hotel, the Bowery Hotel, and the Waverly Inn, among other properties), liked to say hip-hop is the lingua franca of our time, and so the line had a name. But what it didn’t yet have was a conscience.
Esta historia es de la edición January 6–19, 2020 de New York magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición January 6–19, 2020 de New York magazine.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Unmasking Diddy
The rap mogul shook off decades of rumored bad behavior with wholesome PR revamps. Now the allegations against him are his legacy.
Staging Sufjan
How playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury turned a classic indie-rock album into a Justin Peck-choreographed dance piece that's now Broadway bound.
Justin Kuritzkes Serves an Ace
With his first movie script for the erotic tennis drama Challengers, he has gone from struggling playwright to in-demand screenwriter.
To Brooklyn, by Way of Paris and Rome
A whirlwind week with Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri as she stages the brand's first New York runway show in a decade.
A Burlesque Family at Home
Showbiz couple Angie Pontani and Brian Newman’s high-spirited Marine Park house.
A Bistro With Shish Barak
Huda impressively balances its many influences.
THE 'DEBATE ME BRO
Mehdi Hasan's aggressive interviewing style landed him a Sunday show on MSNBC. Until he started talking about Palestine.
THE MAN WHO GOSSIPED TOO MUCH
For almost two decades, JOHN NELSON anonymously published blind items skewering the Hollywood elite on the blog CRAZY DAYS AND NIGHTS. Then his identity was revealed in the midst of a messy affair.
TODD BLANCHE IS A SURPRISINGLY COMPETENT LAWYER. AND HE'S ON TRACK TO KEEP HIS CLIENT OUT OF JAIL UNTIL THE ELECTION. IN DEFENSE OF TRUMP
TODD BLANCHE WAS looking for his man. Or it could be a woman, but probably not.
Self: Emma Alpern
In Outer Space Why do so many women believe their bodies are controlled by the moon?