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.
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