MIAMI (AP) - Fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer, known in part for starting her own line of tropical print dresses by accident, has died. She was 81.

Gale Schiffman of Quattlebaum Funeral and Cremation Services in West Palm Beach says Pulitzer died on Sunday. She did not know her cause of death.

Pulitzer's tropical print dresses became a sensation in the 1960s and eventually became a fashion classic.

Pulitzer got her start in fashion by spilling orange juice on her clothes. The Palm Beach socialite had a husband who owned orange groves, and after she opened a juice stand in 1959, she asked her seamstress to make dresses in colourful prints that would camouflage fruit stains.

The dresses hung on a pipe behind her and soon outsold her juice.