Lucas Lecacheur, a French designer and lifelong surfer, is redefining surfboard aesthetics with radical shapes inspired by crab pincers, stingrays, and duck feet. His creations, including a split board resembling crab claws and a webbed-bottom design, are surprisingly functional.
Currently in Australia for Melbourne Design Week, Lecacheur is living and working at At the Above gallery on Fitzroy’s Gertrude Street. During his six-week residency, he sleeps on a mattress surrounded by his art—old televisions, lounge chairs, and photos of his boards.
From Rock Music to Surfboard Art
Lecacheur, who grew up on Île de Ré, spent years as a musician in the band Bad Pelicans. He sought to merge his passions for performance and surfing, leading to unconventional designs like a cowboy boot board and a Brutalist board. “In rock’n’roll, I was always looking for a new sound,” he says. “How can I bring that to surfing?”
Functional and Challenging
Despite their outlandish appearances, Lecacheur’s boards are rideable. The Medusa, with its massive flex tail and no leash loop, is particularly challenging. “It feels like being a beginner again,” he notes. Surfers often react with excitement, calling his boards “sick” on the beach.
Lecacheur makes his boards traditionally in factories using fibreglass. He dresses in vintage suits from Yves Saint Laurent, Armani, and Givenchy while shaping. “Style is a muscle,” he explains. “When you dress differently, you get different results.”
Melbourne Design Week Creations
For the event, Lecacheur created two new boards. Château Rouge is a 10-foot board with a cowboy boot nose and forked tail. Another board was dragged behind a ute in the Australian bush to embed debris, later cast in resin. The exhibition also features experimental fins like the spiky Total Mayhem and the Bat Fin.
His Guillotine board resides in a Tokyo gallery. Lecacheur has a following in Japan and the US, spending half the year on the road. Though lonely at times, he believes in pushing boundaries: “Someone has to try, otherwise you’re not evolving.”
White Fin Project
Beyond boards, Lecacheur’s White Fin Project attaches a white fin to everyday objects—clocks, ATMs, the Eiffel Tower—turning them into “vehicles of magic.” He says, “I do it to help people dream more and accept their own ideas.” Melbourne Design Week runs until 24 May.
