This is Not a Surfboard

“It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think.” —Michel Houellebecq

It is the common practice of filmmakers in the Anglosphere to compress the French experience into a flickering montage of berets and baguettes, cut to the wheezing of a squeeze-box. France, immobile as marble. A country fixed 60 years hence when Brigitte Bardot was the epitome of beauty, Godard and Truffaut owned cinema, Catholicism ruled the heart, and the African colonies had yet to revolt. 

France is Emily in her brittle theme-park Paris, immigrant camps, and men-only cafés vanished. France is Dion Agius and Craig Anderson in Kai Neville’s whimsical version of Hossegor, all Bolex camera grain, the surf stars inhaling the ubiquitous Alsace pale lager Kronenbourg 1664. 

That’s all, of course, a dismissal of reality. France is as fast and warm and electric as the patois and rap from Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, and Nigeria, and as terrifyingly based as the uncomfortable internal meanderings of Houellebecq’s antiheroes. 

And here, in modern France, we must insert the iconoclast Mr. Lucas Lecacheur, an uncommonly beautiful man of 29 with a penchant for ultra-formal dress-up: Prussian-style military jackets, high-waisted pleated trousers, and double-breasted suits. In photographs, his face is inscrutable as he stares down the camera. 

Lecacheur lives in Paris, in the 18th arrondissement, that heady part of town bathed in a West African richness. He’s a DJ, a frontman for the band Bad Pelicans (“Too Cool for the Wave Pool” is the title of one surf-themed song), and a surfboard shaper under the label Perfect Designs. His stated goal is to “reignite the cutting-edge spark that once fueled surfing.” 

Several years ago, we began to see the fruits of his labors: The Chainsaw Gutsfuck surfboard fin, a spinning steel blade. The Medusa surfboard, where curving prongs twist from the vertical space. A chain-link leg rope. The coffin board. A surfboard in the shape of a door. It culminated in a documentary called Bloody Knuckles, where Lecacheur personally proved, in waves near Biarritz, that at least to some degree his surrealist surfboards work. 

At just before one o’clock on a winter afternoon, I find Lecacheur on a train to Méribel in the Swiss Alps, on what he calls his “new quest for perfection.” His fit? Black cowboy boots, black jeans, a black leather jacket, his black hair harnessed by a black Diamond Horseshoe cowboy hat from the Texan house Resistol, a $500 purchase no man would ever regret. It’s been three months since he last went surfing, when he piloted a design he calls “Satan” on a storm-ridden left-hander in the Baltic Sea near the Swedish town of Simrishamn. 

Surfing and music came into Lecacheur’s life when he was 8 years old. “I never let go of these two dreams,” he says. “I love surfing. It’s great, it’s cool, it’s pure. The art of adaptation, the impossible quest for perfection. Surfing, to me, is as absurd as it is eternal.” 

Lecacheur grew up on Île de Ré, a 19-milelong island off La Rochelle described by the New York Times as “the true heart of seaside chic.” Surfing kept Lecacheur active during the long, gloomy European winters, his home break a soft point perfect for logging. 

“A good wave to develop an elegant silhouette,” he says, although he was more a “thruster grom,” apart from a brief flirtation with a twin-fin fish when he was 10. Lecacheur talks about “freedom, modern society, and the increasingly urgent need to reinvent oneself, to see oneself through new eyes.”  

“Why is it becoming increasingly urgent?” I ask him. I feel pretty good as I lean into surfing as a devotional art. 

“Our lives are becoming more and more individualized, but we’re behaving less and less like individuals,” he answers. “It’s important to keep breathing differently, have personal and unique references, and be able to tell stories of your own.” 

The daring creations of Perfect Designs aren’t for everyone. Lecacheur says he and his co-founder pal, Fernando Leão, who’s no longer part of the gang, have maddened conventional thinkers. 

“We didn’t do it on purpose, but it was really fun reading all the people [online] arguing with each other about two men in black, shaping a cowboy-boot surfboard while wearing suits,” he says. “It started as just an internet thing. But then we appeared in public, at a surf festival in the southwest of France, parading around in our black sunglasses at night. At first people were honking at us, yelling, ‘Perfect Designs!’ But then things got pretty wild, and some people started to hate us so much, to the point of a real death wish.”

“A death wish?” I ask. 

“Yeah, this French dude at a Portuguese longboard festival was so mad at us that, after yelling his heart out, he stood up and kicked a trash can with all his anger. He broke his toe. The next day, he appeared with a bandage. I believe he was supposed to be in the competition and couldn’t [surf after the injury]. Many people were mad at us for that. Like, ‘Did you see what you made him do?’” 

Lecacheur says he wants to “transgress” surfing’s codes. 

“The norms, the ‘how a surfer should be, how a surfer should look,’” he says. “All these things that tie down creativity and the possibilities of being unique. Surfing is also a travel experience, but it feels that everyone travels the same way. In that way, is the ‘travel’ even real? I wish surfers in general were more open-minded, curious about what they don’t know, and would take themselves less seriously.” 

Complicated art based on an uncomplicated, unsullied pleasure, if you’ll allow the theft of a line from the art critic Robert Hughes. 

Lecacheur also reports that he wants to connect to surfing’s “freedom of self-expression. I don’t want to be scared to try things. But that also means allowing a new spirit to come through, and not just rotting in reverence for the old one.” 

“What do you wish for the surfing world?” I ask him. 

“I wish surfers could ride the waves in their minds more often.”

[Feature Image Caption: Photo by Nils Sjöholm]