On Thursday afternoon, the Waverly Inn opened for a rare lunch service to have a good time the Lingua Franca and John Hardy Mother’s Day collaboration.

“This place has fed me, literally and figuratively,” said Lingua Franca founder Rachelle Hruska MacPherson. The brand’s newly opened town house headquarters are positioned just a couple of blocks away from the favored restaurant.

The brand new “Mother Franca Project” includes embroidered cashmere sweaters and a customizable John Hardy necklace, which incorporates a sterling silver pendant that might be engraved with the initials of the wearer’s nearest and dearest. Contained in the Waverly Inn, several Lingua Franca embroiderers were at work customizing cashmere sweaters for lunch guests, a lot of whom were already donning the John Hardy necklace.

“This collab is de facto to have a good time moms and motherhood,” said MacPherson during lunch, noting that she became aware of John Hardy creative chairman Reed Krakoff while working as an assistant at Baron Capital Management, prior to founding GuestofaGuest.com and her fashion brand. “I finally got to satisfy [Krakoff] 15 years later, within the flesh, and he delivered,” added MacPherson. “The thing with Reed is he’s so excited to create really fun products. It’s fun to be around people who find themselves excitable and passionate.”

Krakoff, who joined John Hardy in fall 2022 after 4 years as chief artistic officer for Tiffany & Co., noted that he and his wife Delphine have been longtime fans of Lingua Franca, and that the collaboration was ultimately born out of friendship.

“I began to do some latest things with John Hardy, work out methods to reinvent that brand, and the thought of expertise and customization and the laid-back-by-the-pool attitude of each brands gave the look of they mesh rather well together,” said Krakoff.

“John Hardy has an artisan community in Bali of about 400 artisans — and as you may see, Rachelle has even some artisans here today embroidering sweaters. So it gave the look of there have been plenty of similarities when it comes to how we each approach design. Once we began talking it really made sense,” he added. “Most significantly, it’s been easy and fun and collaborative — as this stuff ought to be.”