Lingua Franca Is Moving Beyond the Slogans
2018 was a banner year for Lingua Franca. Designer Rachelle Hruska had created the label two years prior, after taking up embroidery to help manage her postpartum anxiety and depression. By then, its homemade-style stitched message sweaters had fully entered the Trump 1.0 resistance zeitgeist. Tessa Thompson wore a piece honoring female directors at Sundance; Connie Britton sported one tagged “Poverty Is Sexist” on the Golden Globes red carpet. Reese Witherspoon swept up 20 custom “Time’s Up” designs. Hruska’s team kept busy stitching acres of cashmere with slogans like “Covfefe” and “Bad Hombre.” The pieces were accessorized with pink pussy hats and protest signs across the nation. A year later, the brand collaborated with Margaret Atwood, a project that included sweaters emblazoned with “Praise Be,” “Nolite,” and “Blessed be the Fruit.”
Doesn’t that feel like roughly a million years ago? When we speak, right before the official start of New York Fashion Week, Hruska is, by her own admission, a little hungover. She had a semi-wild night, culminating at 3 A.M., following her first-ever runway show, with pals like Jenna Lyons, Molly Ringwald, and Gina Gershon on the catwalk. Securing the location, the Bowery Hotel, was not the heaviest lift (Hruska’s husband, Sean MacPherson, is the owner), but it did provide boundless inspiration for the collection—models toted The Bowery’s signature teddy bear Bo, and the hotel’s tassels and tapestries were incorporated into the pieces.
While attendees like Susan Sarandon and Katie Couric sported message sweaters front row, the collection itself did not feel as explicitly political to the naked eye. Perhaps that’s because the very concept of “the resistance” is, much like Hruska this morning, a little hungover. Many fashion brands are veering apolitical, with some pivoting rightward. The left is splintered, and while people are still taking to the streets to protest, for example, ICE raids and the denial of trans health care, massive Women’s March-level droves have not yet turned out in force.
Circa 2016, Hruska admits that the moment “swept me off my feet, and I wasn’t expecting it. I totally just went for it head first, and do not have any regrets.” All right, maybe one or two. Every so often, she says, she looks back and thinks: “‘Oh, that’s a little cringeworthy.’ And then I’m like, ‘Is it? We all were doing it.’”
This summer, Lingua Franca turned its energy to making Madame President sweatshirts for a presumed Kamala Harris victory. “We were preparing to literally sell thousands of those when she won,” Hruska tells me. In that giddy moment of Brat-assisted optimism, she found herself looking back on Lingua Franca’s Instagram archives and asking herself, “‘Should I archive some of this [older] stuff? This is cringey.’ I just had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that.’...Now it’s like, no, I don’t regret anything. All of it was done from a place of purity and not a place of commerce. And of course, I have to do business. I have to make money. I have to hire people and pay people and do it sustainably. It’s hard. It’s really a lot of money, my God, to do this. But at the core of everything I’ve done, it’s never been about money.”
Hruska expanded the line into a full ready-to-wear collection in 2020, though she notes that the famed sweaters still make up half of her business. Being tagged with the resistance label based on that hero piece is, she says, “frustrating, because I think people pegged us as that. But that’s OK, because the alternative is to not say anything.”
Now Hruska is navigating what being a political brand means in 2025, when there’s a collective weariness around the concept. She considers herself just as much of an activist, she says: “We are still fighting the good fight.” But she wants to fight that fight in a different, more measured way than she did the first time around. Back then, “it consumed me, and I just don’t want to live in a world where this man is consuming me anymore. I want to create what I would create whether he was president or not. So that’s the battle, right?”
At the same time, the quiet can feel eerie. “I can’t believe there are no marches,” she says. “We were all in Washington D.C. for the Women’s March [in 2017], and we’re all exhausted. It didn’t work. And there’s a feeling of despair. I’m worried about that, because I do feel like we are normalizing this behavior. And historically, that’s what happens.”
Hruska has drawn a line in the sand in her personal life, cutting out some people who sit on the other side of the aisle. (“It’s been, actually, quite easy,” she says.) She’s also drawing those lines professionally. Since she owns her brand, “I get to make all the decisions, and I will not be dressing anyone who supports Trump,” she declares.
Some of the political content on Lingua Franca’s Instagram has lost them some followers lately. And gained them some haters. A recent post showcasing a “Science Not Fiction” sweater whose caption critiqued Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew the comment “Your elitism is showing!”
But, Hruska says, that’s the cost of doing business. Amid the post-show recaps, “we also are commenting on the news. That’s who we are. I had to write a newsletter and explain to our followers: This is going to be chaotic. I’m going to do something really cool and talk about a stuffed bear at The Bowery, and then I’m going to go into Trump, and you can handle it. I know you can.”
She points to the slogan on the sweater she wore at the show: “Art is the triumph over chaos.” For her, coming together with like-minded friends and community to create something, even if the collection was not as straightforwardly partisan as her previous work, was a political act in itself. (It also helped her, she says, to stay off her phone—she has been prone to doomscrolling lately.)
What the rest of Fashion Month holds is less clear. Willy Chavarria made a bold statement at Paris men’s week last month, with a collection inspired by what he called “the beauty of existence, resistance, and persistence.” At the end of the show, Chavarria joined his models on the runway wearing a T-shirt that read: “How we love is who we are.”
But whether other designers will follow suit is still TBD. This isn’t necessarily a sudden 180-degree turn, either. Even the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 got a muted response from most designers that season, with a few notable exceptions. Hruska is distressed by what she sees as some of her cohort’s normalizing of Trump 2.0, and she doesn’t have any qualms about saying so publicly. “I don’t care if I don’t have supporters in high places because of how I speak. And I actually do look down on people who are unwilling to say, ‘This is not normal and we should not normalize it.’”
Yes, she admits, “I did covfefe and I did all these things. And you might say that’s cringeworthy. And granted, I can give it to you. I think it’s incredibly cringeworthy to dress people that I consider fascist and then put it on your Instagram and support it. I think that is cringeworthy, and I’m not afraid to say that.”
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