LUCKY FISH

soluckyfish.com

As kids in SA we would say “you lucky fish” to someone who had gotten, done or become something enviable. And that’s what inspired the company’s name.

Lucky Fish is a line of clothing and home furnishings hand-printed in Brooklyn, NY, with its imagery and color palate inspired by my growing up in South Africa, and my global travels that followed. Although I didn’t use the name back then, the Lucky Fish idea was born in the mid-1980s, at the height of the struggle against apartheid, where my generation of South African artists were challenged to integrate our political activism and new African identity with our art work and personal style. In those days, we could be found one day printing a new “struggle” T-shirt or banner to support some new campaign, the next day printing dresses or leggings because we couldn’t find the clothes we wanted in stores.

Fast forward two decades, add a lot of traveling and a couple of kids, and Lucky Fish is producing clothing in New York, motivated first and foremost by need (in its current incarnation, Lucky Fish started out printing T-shirts in a garage on a beach vacation for my own and friends’ kids) using the same perfectly imperfect hand-screen print techniques, and inspired by the same playful universe of images drawn from nature and culture across the four corners of the Earth.