At last Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, Hollywood’s stars promenaded in black to show support for Time’s Up, an anti-harassment initiative formed by the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, and Shonda Rhimes.

Afterward, much Internet ink was spilled deconstructing the spectacle: Was the funereal dresscode a culture-shifting move or simply an ephemeral act of Hollywood feel-goodism? Are high fashion and political activism compatible in the first place? But only one outfit of the night managed to become a talking point in its own right. It was a black cashmere sweater, worn by the actress Connie Britton, that was embroidered across the chest, in swirly cursive, with the phrase “Poverty Is Sexist.” Twitter detectives swiftly determined that it was made by the brand Lingua Franca, and posted the sweater’s price—three hundred and eighty dollars—which struck some observers as absurdly at odds with its embroidered message, even if a hundred dollars of the proceeds went to the Campaign for Female Education. "For that price, City Harvest could’ve delivered 1,524 lbs of food to our city’s hungry,” the editor Kim Kelly tweeted. Britton herself addressed the backlash in a tweet: “I just don't think a $5000 gown would have added to the conversation in the same way.” It was a night for making statements through fashion. Britton just chose to spell hers out.
Rachelle Hruska MacPherson, the founder of Lingua Franca, found out that Britton was wearing one of her sweaters on national television as she was eating dinner at a West Village restaurant with her two young sons and her husband, the hotelier Sean MacPherson. They both have hectic schedules: he is the proprietor of voguish hangouts for the Manhattan demimonde, such as the Bowery and Maritime hotels; she is also the C.E.O. of Guest of a Guest, a media company devoted to chronicling the every move of the cosmopolitan well-heeled, which she co-founded in 2008 with one of the Winklevoss twins. (In 2012, she became the sole owner.) The couple often work together—Guest of a Guest and Lingua Franca share space in the basement of the plush Jane Hotel, which MacPherson owns—but during mealtimes they have a strict no-technology policy. Yet, on Sunday night, Hruska’s phone kept buzzing. She thought there might be an emergency. Then she saw the news alerts. “The next day, we sold out of sweaters,” she said.
Lingua Franca, which Hruska founded in 2016, is slow fashion done at the speed of Twitter. The brand mostly sells cashmere sweaters, hand-embroidered with words borrowed from trending topics: “Science Not Fiction, " “Wonder Woman, " “Where's the Outrage?” Hruska pays a team of fifty embroiderers twenty-five dollars per hour to make the sweaters, which are sold on her Web site and at high-end boutiques and department stores. There is something undeniably savvy about her model for sewing the zeitgeist onto clothing, transforming hashtags into luxury goods overnight. The brand feels perfectly engineered for the current moment, when both language and politics are being metabolized rapidly and chaotically into the cultural bloodstream. (The brand already has “Oprah for Pres” and “Stable Genius” sweaters posted on Instagram.) But Hruska claims that the brand’s growth has been entirely organic, that the company has no publicist, that she never meant to have a fashion company at all.
It all began, as things sometimes do, in a bungalow in Montauk. Hruska’s therapist had told her that she had to find something to do with her hands, to help her cope with her anxiety. So she picked up an old cashmere sweater, and tried to remember the needlepoint she’d learned from her grandma, years ago, as a child growing up in Nebraska. The first word she embroidered was "Booyah," in bright red thread. She posted a photo of her handiwork to Instagram, she told me, “and then all my friends wanted me to make them one.”

Her first Lingua Franca sweaters featured phrases that Hruska took from rap lyrics. “I have always liked the juxtaposition of embroidering a hip-hop lyric onto cashmere,” she says. “It had this fuck-you nature. Like, this is, first of all, a women’s craft that is not taken seriously. And then a lot of those lyrics are about making women seem like objects. So I thought it would be funny to put them on high-end vintage cashmere.” She called the company Lingua Franca, she says, because “I really do think hip hop is like the lingua franca of our times. A woman on the Upper East Side knows the same Drake lyrics as a kid living in Venezuela. I liked that it was a cohesive language.” I asked her about the racial politics of a white woman of privilege embroidering sweaters with “Original Gangsta” and “I Miss Biggie” and selling them for hundreds of dollars apiece. “Listen, we know it is a problematic enterprise,” she said. “And, at this point, a large part of our staff is not white. I know in my heart I’m doing it for pure reasons.”
After hand-selling the sweaters to the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio over the summer of 2016, Hruska said that offers began to pour into her Instagram direct messages from buyers like Net-a-Porter. Then, when Donald Trump was elected, she pivoted entirely to “resistance wear.” She made sweaters that said “Fake President" and “Love Trumps Hate," “Covfefe” and "We Are All Immigrants," and started donating a hundred dollars from each sale to charities like Planned Parenthood and the A.C.L.U. Hruska's parents voted for Trump, and she has run in the same social circles as Ivanka (“I met with Jared Kushner when he wanted to buy Guest of a Guest,” she told me), but the election galvanized her. “Sometimes change comes from people running for office,” she told me. “But when you see someone wearing “I Miss Barack” on a beautiful sweater that is high-priced, that’s a message, too.”
Lingua Franca is just one of the high-end clothing companies taking advantage of this political moment. Dior sent a seven-hundred-dollar “We Should All Be Feminists” shirt down the runway last year. Opening Ceremony launched a pricey “Action Capsule" collection, which critics condemned for commodifying protest. But Lingua Franca’s sweaters, with their homespun feel and lightning-fast production cycle, hold a special fascination among celebrities. Every week, a new starlet—Kristen Bell, Mandy Moore—seems to pop up on Instagram in a Lingua Franca sweater that reads “Equality” or “The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” sweaters that Hruska insists she did not send out as swag. Bono’s ONE foundation commissioned Hruska to make a batch of sweaters to gift to board members (that’s how Connie Britton got hers). Two days after the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep wore a sweater embroidered with “Time’s Up” in an appearance on “Ellen.” It was a gift from Reese Witherspoon, who commissioned a batch as gifts for the Time’s Up group’s founding members. On camera, Streep gave one to Ellen DeGeneres and another to her costar in “The Post,” Tom Hanks.
As long as people feel that they can to shop their way to enlightenment, there will always be Levi’s Wokes and “We Should All Be Feminists” T-shirts. “But we are not trying to make this affordable so everyone can have a sweater,” Hruska told me. “We are trying to bring a dialogue into high fashion.” Lingua Franca sweaters are tools of revolt available to only a few, objects of desire doubling awkwardly as vectors of populist messaging. Hruska, who has built two careers on a canny understanding of the habits of the rich and famous, envisions the brand, above all, as a kind of high-fashion Robin Hood. “What I want to do is use these sweaters as a conduit to move money from people who can spend to organizations who can make a difference,” she said. So far, she added, she has donated more than a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to charity. “We aren’t perfect—I get the irony. But would you prefer we just do nothing?”

Source: newyorker.com