Lilly Pulitzer’s prints have meant spring for 50 years

Fifty years worth of cheery, campy Lilly Pulitzer prints have become shorthand for spring and summer fashion.

Some are sweet — flowers and palm trees — and others are sassy — streakers and martini glasses — but there’s never been a print repeated for a second season.

They’re similar enough, though, that they’re all recognizable as Lillys. The common thread often are the bright shades of pink, yellow, green and blue that originally covered up Pulitzer’s fruit stains when she was squeezing juice at a stand in Palm Beach, Fla.

Here’s the company creative director Janie Schoenborn’s hit parade of prints:

Jubilee Patch, a checkerboard of all the most popular motifs, ranging from tigers to toile. There’s more pink, green and yellow than you’d find in most Easter baskets.

Bunny Hunt, which makes a game of finding little rabbits against an uncharacteristically light background of pastel pink and yellow, is from 2008. Lilly Pulitzer was among the first to do novelty holiday prints, and Easter is the brand’s most important season, according to Schoenborn.

Bicentennial, with cartoon portraits of Benjamin Franklin in red, white and blue, from 1976. “It’s what people were talking about a lot at the time,” Schoenborn says. “It’s what happens when cocktail conversation gets translated to a print.”

Ring My Bell, a pink, white and two-tone green print that re-creates in colorful style the curlycues of the ironwork of the gate in front of Pulitzer’s home in the 1960s.

Streaker, a classic rule-breaker print with naked male and female cartoonish bodies set among pop-art waves of green, hot pink and blue, as well as oversized floating flowers in orange and pink. From a distance, you can’t see the specifics of the print, Schoenborn says, so it was a way for Pulitzer’s social set to be a little edgy without everyone knowing it.

An ode to Disney, an explosion of Mickeys and Minnies in pink, green and yellow, from the early ’70s as Disney World was opening in Orlando — a very big deal in Florida. Even then, Schoenborn says, Disney had very particular rules about using Mickey Mouse’s likeness.

Paltrow Patch from 2009 by Gwyneth Paltrow, a patchwork of sea life in baby blue and magenta. As part of the anniversary celebration, nine celebrities designed prints for the Colorful Cause initiative with a portion of proceeds going toward The Epidermolysis Bullosa Medical Research Foundation, which targets a rare childhood skin disease.

Love You Too Much, a garden of heart flowers with blades of graffiti grass, is another Schoenborn print. She says it came from a song her mother made up to sing to her children and her dogs. Now many Lilly staffers use it as a greeting — even signing e-mails with “LYTM.”

Color by Numbers, an oversized floral in mostly dark pink and white with touches of green, is new this spring. There’s an outline of a blooming garden with only portions filled in. Even though it’s the finished print, it still looks like a work in progress.