The Art Behind Every Scarf: Our Collections Explained
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Every Leeloo + Zohan scarf starts as an idea pulled from somewhere unexpected—a museum archive, a faded postcard, a New York City landmark, a folk art tradition that deserves a second life. We don’t license prints or buy stock patterns. Each design is built from scratch, then printed on silk habotai and finished by hand.
Here’s the story behind each of our collections.
The Vintage Postcards Series
Old postcards carry a specific kind of beauty: bold color, flat perspective, and a sentiment that feels both naive and sincere. Our Vintage Postcards collection takes imagery from early-20th-century travel postcards—beach scenes, hotel facades, seaside towns—and reconstructs them as wearable prints.
The palette runs warm: coral, seafoam, sun-bleached red. The compositions are graphic and deliberate, with striped borders and hand-lettered typography woven into the design. Each scarf is a small piece of travel history you can knot at your neck.
Key pieces: Raleigh Miami, Beach People, Shelborne Hotel, Miami, Colorado Springs.
The American Folk Art Series
American folk art is deeply geometric, richly colored, and rooted in craft traditions that span centuries—quilting, hex signs, painted tinware, theorem painting. Our American Folk Art collection translates these motifs into silk.
The result is a scarf that feels both heritage and modern: symmetric floral fields, saturated earth tones, and a visual density that rewards close looking. These are the kind of prints that look equally at home on a gallery wall or under a denim jacket.
Key pieces: American Folk Art 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5.
The Smithsonian Series
The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds one of the largest collections of American art in the world. Our Smithsonian Series draws from its botanical, natural history, and decorative arts archives to create scarves that carry museum-quality imagery on silk.
These designs tend toward the lush: blooming florals, intricate botanical studies, natural patterns reconstructed with graphic precision. The source material is historic; the execution is unmistakably contemporary.
Key pieces: Solfatara + Mimosa, Hyacinth, Duke of Wellington, Flowers from The Mesa.
The Artist Series
Some artworks are too iconic to leave on a wall. The Artist Series takes fragments of masterworks—sculpture, surrealism, classical painting—and reimagines them as graphic, geometric scarf prints. These aren’t reproductions; they’re reinterpretations.
Michelangelo’s David becomes a grid of marble textures and angles. Magritte’s eye becomes a hypnotic repeat pattern. The goal is to make you see something familiar in a completely new way.
Key pieces: David Michelangelo, False Mirror Pattern.
The Founders Series
Named after Leeloo and Zohan—the two creative companions behind the brand—the Founders Series is where we get personal. These designs are playful, illustrative, and rooted in the visual language of the brand itself.
Key pieces: Le Chat Zohan, Le Chat Leeloo.
NYC Landmarks
Manhattan's West Village is home base. Our landmark scarves distill iconic NYC silhouettes—the Statue of Liberty, Grand Central Terminal, the Brooklyn waterfront—into bold, graphic color on silk. They’re love letters to the city, designed to be worn.
Key pieces: Statue of Liberty, Grand Central Terminal, Red Hook, Brooklyn, Manhattan Towers.
Explore the Full Collection
Every scarf tells a story. The art is the starting point; the silk brings it to life; and the way you wear it makes it yours.