Meet Paul Morris, the NYC Artist Behind Leeloo + Zohan

Every Leeloo + Zohan silk scarf starts in the same place: a studio in New York City, a pile of archival reference images, and one artist trying to figure out what a 19th-century quilt block wants to be in 2026.

That artist is Paul Morris. This is a short introduction to who he is, how the work gets made, and why the brand is named after two cats.

The Short Bio

Paul Morris graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1997. He has worked in New York ever since—primarily as an art director in fashion and editorial, running a parallel practice as a photographer and collage artist. Leeloo + Zohan is where the art-direction eye and the studio practice meet: a catalog of made-to-order silk scarves and fine art prints, each one built from original photography, archival imagery, or both.

The brand name is after Leeloo and Zohan—the resident studio cats, who also appear as woodcut portraits on several scarves in the Founders Series collection. If you've seen Le Chat Leeloo or Le Chat Zohan in the catalog, you've met the founders.

The Process, in Three Parts

A finished scarf at Leeloo + Zohan is almost always the result of three separate stages of work. Understanding the process is the shortest path to understanding why the scarves look the way they do.

1. Sourcing

Every design starts with a source image—not a stock pattern, not a licensed reproduction. Most of Paul's source material falls into three buckets:

• Original photography. Shot by Paul, often in NYC, the Hudson Valley, or on travel. The Brooklyn and Manhattan architecture scarves pull from his own street photography.
• Archival museum imagery. Primarily the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Library of Congress—both have extensive public-domain collections. Scarves like Solfatara + Mimosa, On The Plains & Chicago, and Dragon Egg Adventure draw from these archives.
• Vintage ephemera. Postcards, travel posters, scientific illustrations. Manhattan Towers 1.0 and the Met Museum scarf both start from early-20th-century NYC postcards.

The sourcing stage is unglamorous—weeks of pulling, annotating, and ruling out images before one earns its way to the next stage.

2. Collage and Color

Sourced images get cut apart, recolored, and reassembled. This is where most of the work actually happens. A photograph of the Chrysler Building becomes a geometric column study; a museum-archive hyacinth becomes a mosaic-framed floral. The rule is: the result has to be a new artwork. If the finished design reads as a straight reproduction, it's not done yet.

Color gets pushed to the saturated end of the spectrum—folk-art palette logic, not painterly subtlety. This is part of why the scarves are printed on silk habotai rather than twill: habotai holds the pushed color better, with minimal fading across the weave.

3. Printing and Finishing

Every scarf is digitally printed on premium silk habotai to order, in editions of 100. The edition ends when the run sells out—scarves are not reprinted, and retired designs stay retired. The hem is machine-rolled (a "baby hem" in textile terms), which sits flatter than a machine-rolled hem and preserves the edge of the artwork.

Fine art prints are produced separately, by WhiteWall in Germany, on Fuji Crystal Archive paper face-mounted under acrylic glass. Several scarves have matching prints— Solfatara + Mimosa, Egyptian P. Chrysler, Bashakill Fall among them.

The Studio

The Leeloo + Zohan studio is in Manhattan—a working photography and collage space, not a showroom. Orders ship directly from New York; trade and press inquiries go through the same address. There's no warehouse, no third-party fulfillment. This is intentional: the close loop between design and production is the only way to keep edition runs small and quality consistent.

If you've read our FAQ and seen "designed in our New York City studio" on every product page, now you know the actual studio.

The Influence Map

Paul's design vocabulary pulls from a few specific places, in roughly these proportions:

• American folk art and quilting traditions. The full American Folk Art series —1.1 through 1.5—is the deepest expression of this.
• Early-20th-century graphic design and travel posters. Visible in the NYC landmark scarves and the Shelborne Hotel, Miami Art Deco piece.
• Mid-century photography and magazine layouts. The art-director's eye for composition and color balance, applied to textile scale.
• Botanical and scientific illustration. Museum archives, 19th-century field guides, Fraktur manuscripts.

It's an unusually coherent set of references for a contemporary scarf brand—most accessories brands default to abstract florals or house logos. Leeloo + Zohan's commitment is that every scarf be about something specific.

How to Buy

The full catalog is about fifty pieces across silk scarves, fine art prints, and a smaller apparel line. Most scarves are made to order (5-7 day lead time); a core rotation is in stock for 2-day fulfillment.

For media interviews, press photography, or trade inquiries: info@leeloozohan.com.

To see the range in context, start with the best silk scarves for art lovers or the Artist Series collection.