Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens have built a world that represents their raw and uncompromising vision—and their furniture collection is an extension of their own lives.
Michèle Lamy’s jewellery clinks and jingles as she settles into a seat at the end of a long table in the back room of Salon 94’s offices, where an entourage of devoted friends and team members are dispersed throughout. The first thing that strikes me as I greet her is her scent: she smells sweet and musky. She must bathe in oud, I think to myself.
Today, in New York, Lamy is draped with a soft, olive-green shawl. When she smiles, her assorted gold tooth gems flicker. She wears her long dark hair slicked back with pigment, and a signature line is drawn down the middle of her forehead. Her black-pigment-dipped fingers are stacked with rings from her HUNROD jewellery collection. A bullet lighter rests to her right, near a pack of Dunhill International cigarettes. She lights more cigarettes than she finishes; she keeps time with them.
“Do you have a big night ahead of you?” I ask. “I don’t know what you call a big night,” she replies, matter-of-factly. Tonight, she is heading from the uptown gallery to the Roxy, where she will attend a private screening for Queendom, a new documentary film on Russian performance artist Gena Marvin directed by Agniia Galdanova—who Lamy is also collaborating with on Be the Change, a movie filmed in Jordan. “We have to change ourselves if we want anything to change,” she says resolutely. “What do you mean by that?” I ask. “Do you know the poetry of Etel Adnan?” she responds. “Yes,” I answer. “Then you understand.”
To create is to resist/ It’s an act of rebellion/ Against the status quo, Adnan once wrote. Lamy’s words echo this sentiment: “What’s left of our vitality should be devoted to resistance.” Resistance is ingrained in everything Lamy does: from how she presents herself to the material she uses in her work. It is present in the collaborators she chooses, too. For Lamy, everyday life is inherently theatrical—one either plays a role imposed by society or seizes the agency to direct their own script. For her, resistance isn’t about rejecting performance, but about reclaiming it as a tool.
Destruction is impossible to ignore, we both agree, presented on a never-ending loop on our phones as we doomscroll between mood-board-ready editorials and scenes of mass decimation. There have been over 60,000 reported dead in Palestine with a true number much higher—but the word genocide is still divisive. “Nobody wants to know history,” says Lamy. “They think, If there had been the internet, there would have not been any concentration camp because people would have no excuse to say they have not seen it.” She shakes her head in disagreement: “Now, it’s in front of our eyes every hour and there is no change.”
When Lamy speaks, it is with intention. When she is silent, she appears to be probing the future and contemplating the past, while still present. She is rooted in her own nonlinear world. At 81 years old, Lamy’s life is of mythic proportions, and she remembers it all. As the story goes, her parents met in the French Resistance—her father was helping people pass through the war zone and into the mountains, and her mother, whose family had a farm and restaurant in Lyon, delivered food on bicycle to the Resistance fighters. Born and raised in the French Alps, she learned early on that survival is an act of defiance. As a young adult, she studied philosophy under Gilles Deleuze in Lyon in the late ‘60s (afterward they worked on a film together about an uprising in a mental institution). Later, she was a defence lawyer in Paris, and then a cabaret dancer.
In 1979, she set out to Los Angeles where she spent the next two decades. “So, did you decide to move to LA just to see a big fire?” she asks me as I share that I moved to the city just last year. I pause to think—we have been speaking of the fires consuming the city we both love: “Maybe in my subconscious.” “Mhm hmm,” she hums as we sit with the thought of our city burning.
LA still holds a special place in Lamy’s heart: it is where she married (and later divorced) her first husband, Richard Newton, had her daughter, the artist Scarlett Rouge, founded her cult clothing line Lamy in 1984, and met Rick Owens, then a young patternmaker, who she hired in 1990. The two fell in love, were married, and have been a duo ever since. Soon after, she opened two legendary Hollywood restaurants: Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés. Then, in 2003, the couple decamped to Paris and founded OWENSCORP the following year. Within the company–which includes Owens’ eponymous label–Lamy wears many hats, including overseeing the Rick Owens furniture line.
“I have always been building,” says Lamy–but when she and Owens decided to furnish their Paris loft on their own, everything clicked into place. “It was like an explosion of an idea,” she reflects. “It comes down to this: These were things we needed to have,” she says. “We started to make these pieces in 2005, but there is always a past,” she adds with a laugh.
“There is always a past.” In LA, during the time she refers to as “pre-Rick,” she built a house with an architect friend. Then, she built Les Deux Cafés in an empty parking lot just south of Hollywood Boulevard. “It was easy to make a garden because you take the asphalt out,” she says. Before it was a parking lot, there had been an orange orchard there, so the dirt was super good.” From that fertile decade in Los Angeles, everything else grew. “It is all a continuation.” There was furniture made out of necessity, as an alternative to buying, “and then there are the things that turn out to make a great story, one that continues now.”
Today, in Salon 94’s downstairs gallery, she crouches atop the Stag Stool. From where I am standing, it looks as if the antler backrest is a set of wings sprouting out of her back. The Rick Owens furniture is raw, plywood and bones or steel with a black, rust patina. It is unconcerned with unnatural colour or any embellishments beyond hefty Elk and Moose antlers, collected in Canada after they are naturally shed by the animals. “Usually you see fences with plywood,” says Lamy, gesturing to the stool’s foundation. But she had something else in mind. The first Stag Stool was created for Travis Scott’s travelling environment, and the rest of the latest Rick Owens collection followed. This is how Lamy works: one idea flows into the other.
Accompanying the brutalist designs is a monochrome backstage-setup made for Travis Scott and complete with built-in speakers, plush seating, and oversized pillows. “This piece went all over his tour of Europe,” she explains. “They were trucking it with the rest of the stage to every city.” The structure was first imagined as a recording studio for Lamy’s own musical project. “I’ve already made two albums, but I always want more,” she says with a smile. But when this original idea stalled, Lamy repurposed it into something new for Scott.
Lamy is a conductor of creative minds. Collaborations are at the heart of her practice, each more fantastical and boundary-breaking than the next—from turning an empty LA lot into a restaurant, to posing for Juergen Teller with fake concrete on her face in the bathtub next to Kim Kardashian (whose ex-husband Kanye West was perhaps the furniture line’s earliest client with a custom alabaster bed), to hosting a three-day salon on a barge during Frieze London in 2014.
Lamy is a storyteller: She thinks about proportions in almost a cosmic way, in which equilibrium is maintained by platform shoes paired with skinny pants and geometric outerwear. Later, she changes into a Rick Owens jacket with tall, triangular shoulder pads. She finds harmony in extremes, and possesses a conviction that, on the surface level, manifests in an avant-garde self-presentation unbeholden to conventions.
“Do you have an unrealised project?” I ask her.
“Every day I want to realise another project.”
“But how do you go from thinking about it to doing it?”
“I’ve been around the block for a while, so even if my ideas jump from one place to the next, there is still coordination,” she offers. “It’s all about having a project, building something, and then meeting different people.”
Words by Meka Boyle
