Inside Martha Madigan x Lafayette 148’s Collection

Celebrating your mother’s legacy once she’s passed is bittersweet. Claire Khodara and Grace Fuller Marroquin have recently embarked on that journey. Partnering with Lafayette 148, the daughters of photographer Martha Madigan worked with creative director Emily Smith to transform one of Madigan’s photographs into a capsule collection for the brand. “This is something she always wanted to do,” they told the Cut ahead of the exhibition opening. “It picked up a lot of nostalgia for us, but we feel like we’re continuing her legacy in life by doing it.”

On Wednesday, Madigan’s family celebrated the launch and opening alongside friends (including Beanie Feldstein, Kathryn Gallagher, Wes Gordon, and many more) at Lafayette 148’s flagship boutique, where over 15 of Madigan’s photographs will be displayed until early April. The clothing collection is made of four pieces — a silk twill blouse, pants, kaftan, and scarf — all featuring Madigan’s 2010 photo Oahu Hanging Ginger, which Smith chose from Madigan’s studio in Philadelphia when the collaboration began.

“We showed Emily a bunch of cyanotypes and she picked this one thinking it was a six-foot-tall image,” said Khodara. “Even today she told me, ‘I can’t believe that it was only 12 by 12 inches.’ My mom worked with actual foliage — she dried them and shipped them back from Hawaii — so the Oahu hanging ginger is actually that size.”

Madigan’s work, which began in the 1970s, is unique in that it uses a cameraless process using cyanotype, sunlight, and nature. While the work was often done on paper, Fuller Marroquin recalls that “my mother would constantly toil and experiment using cyanotypes with fabric,” which led to the easy translation of her prints on the silk of the collection. While nature is clearly abundant in these pieces, you can also feel the love between mother and daughters that seeps through every article of clothing. Describing it as both “natural and ethereal,” the daughters shared that their favorite pieces of the collection are the kaftan and the silk top. However, I left the evening quietly fawning over Khodara’s custom-made dress for the event, a tighter long-sleeve silk option made for her to perform in.

Below, some moments from the event.