It takes five rings of Marie Sophie Lockhart’s doorbell to get her attention. “I’m so sorry. I had my music on full blast,” she says, ushering me into her apartment that also doubles up as the studio for her label, Lockhart Embroidery. She was in the zone, in full-on focus mode and it’s just as well. Right now she’s the busiest she’s ever been thanks in part to a new collaboration with Barneys Japan, which has her collaborating with a Japanese denim designer on a small capsule collection. “I’m really excited about this one,” she says, animated, showing me swatches of denim she’s just received from Japan along with initial sketches of her ideas. “I’m obsessed with Japan and love that this collaboration is all about fusing East and West.”
The collaborations and projects are piling up fast and much of her rapid can be credited to Drake. “It all started because I was coming home from work with a friend one night and we jumped in a cab. Drake’s latest song ‘How About Now’ came on. You know when you listen to a song for the first time and you’re just obsessed with it? That’s what happened,” she says. “The next morning I woke up and did the praying hands while listening to Drake and just tagged him in as a joke. I never thought he would see it, like it, or even re-post it on his Instagram! I woke up with thousands of new followers, emails and texts. I sent him a direct message to thank him. He wrote back shortly after to congratulate me, tell me it was all love.” Not long after, when he was in New York, he stopped by her apartment to drop off more pieces he wanted embroidered. She created two jeans and a jacket for him – the rest, as they say, is history.
The images went viral and it wasn’t long before the fashion set came knocking. Stella McCartney quickly called on her to work on a project for Beyoncé and Marc Jacobs incorporated her designs onto handbags for his spring/summer 2016 show. “He spotted my work via Instagram. They heard that I had a nice freehand style and good direction. I’ve been working with them for fashion week ever since and now work with his team as a consultant too.” With no PR, she’s relied solely on Instagram to get her designs in front of the masses and celebrities too. “I always create designs I’d like to wear myself so the jeans Miley [Cyrus] bought with UFOs and planets on them, I made for myself after a dream I had. I posted them on Instagram and she really liked them so I made a pair for her.”
Granted, the celebrity and fashion endorsement hasn’t hurt but it’s her clever knack for creating playful, eye-catchy designs that is driving the cult following. And it all started with her love of collecting embroidered patches. Fast-forward two years and she started created her own; her first was an embroidery of a Playboy Bunny. “Collecting for so many years inspired me to start making my own in styles that spoke to be and also the people I know. Nothing beats the satisfaction of making something for yourself.” She gave that first design to a friend who sewed it onto a denim jacket and before long, people kept asking her to create more. “I’ve always tried to have fun and make designs I want to wear without taking myself too seriously.”
Incorporating her designs onto denim was a no-brainer, she tells me. “Denim is such a classic and versatile fabric. It made sense because I could find inexpensive denim in vintage stores so it was less expensive than buying canvas and I discovered it was just a lot more fun to work with.” She draws most of her inspiration from the 70s “because I feel like it was a time where music, love and art flourished,” she explains. “I really like the psychedelic history. It just seemed like a time where people thought in a different way.”
This isn’t her first foray into fashion. Long before setting up Lockhart Embroidery and moving to Brooklyn, she cut her teeth in the industry working at Colette in Paris. “I think I worked in almost every department there. I would get bored easily so always wanted to try other things from street wear to beauty to prêt a porter to working in the art gallery or with the books,” she tells me. “Colette really taught me how to be myself and use my own creativity. Also, working with lots of inspiring artists and fashion designers pushed me to follow my dreams.”
In a world dominated with fast, disposable pieces everyone else has, her designs are a breath of fresh air (her designs can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to create a small piece up to the hundreds of hours for bigger designs). “The appetite for hand embroidery right now is just part of the cyclical nature of things,” she says. “It’s the ultimate antidote to huge mass-production and quick and cheaply manufactured stuff. With hand embroidery you can see that it’s taken incredible attention and care to make, and there’s a personality to it that you can never get with a machine…what has come back is this whole idea that it’s okay for human beings not to be machines; this idea that the imperfect work of a person is actually of value.”
Business is booming and she now presides over a team of three but she has no ambitions of turning into a big business. “I’m just really happy to be the owner of a small business. I’m not trying to make millions of dollars,” she says. “Embroidery is a difficult field to get rich in. Pieces can easily take hundreds of hours but I love it. I do it for the joy of the process.”