Michèle Lamy: ‘This is me, every day’

Photographs Danielle Levitt

And there is Lamy, breathtaking at 81, in a black hooded backless dress – heavy black boots, bare arms and legs and a cashmere jumper worn upside down. Her teeth are gold plated, her eyes framed with kohl, her chin and forehead delicately tattooed with henna. Her fingers, which are heavy with rings and dyed black to the knuckle, are constantly searching for cigarettes. Taxi drivers often ask her to read their palms. “Come in, we can have tea,” she says. “We can have a little cake.” We sit on white sofas that line a terrace, and Pixie leaps on to my lap, mewing lustily.

Lamy is a designer and producer best known for the collaborations with her husband, the American designer Owens. When they set up their own company, Owenscorp, in 2004, he described their business partnership as like “asking a gypsy to organise a war with a fascist”. Today Owens concentrates on the clothes while Lamy focuses on furniture, pieces of which are scattered throughout their home: steel benches stacked with what looks like insulation fabric but is actually felted human hair; stools that bear a caressing antler. Though the company is wildly successful and influential, making about $140m a year, it has always seemed as though the pair were interested less in building a brand than a new reality.

Lamy was born in Jura, France, in 1944. Her father was “in the resistance”, she says. “That’s why I was born. My parents met in the woods.” Her mother brought food to those fighting; soon after, Lamy arrived. “I was born under a tree” – to the sound of bombs.

This is how she picks through her history, the moments that made her, with brief, growled descriptions of beauty and violence, a glass of green tea sipped carefully. In her late teens she visited Tunisia, and upon meeting Berber women finally felt she belonged. “That was when I started doing henna. When I saw these women covered with wrinkles. This beauty.”

Discussing beauty today, two things come to her mind. Firstly, a film she saw this week: Hijra, directed by Shahad Ameen. “The beauty is when the story makes sense,” she says – “when you think we belong. When you hold hands.” Secondly, Kim Kardashian, with whom “I’m very friendly”, she says. The two met in 2013. Lamy and Owens designed her office, and they collaborate on photography projects, FaceTiming at night. “She could not care less about clothes,” says Lamy. “As soon as she’s home, in one second, she’s in her sweats and barefoot. If she sees me like this” – she gestures to her boots and dress – “she asks: ‘Where are you going?’ But this is me every day.” As well as Kardashian’s appearance, there’s beauty, she says, in intergenerational friendships. Also, “I knew the father.” In LA she used to go to a boxing club with Robert Kardashian. She still boxes regularly. “There is something about looking people in the eyes.”

In 1968 Lamy was living in Paris, studying to be a lawyer, working as a cabaret dancer by night and becoming radicalised by the Paris student uprising. She started skipping law classes to go to the lectures next door, where Gilles Deleuze was teaching philosophy, and studied with him for two years. “I feel I always encountered people that were important to me, but also seemed to be important in the way the world was going to go.” She waves her cigarette gloomily. After May 1968, “There is Godard and the movies, and then the end, the terrible end of all that.” She moved to New York, chasing the flakes of idealism she’d witnessed. “In a selfish way I moved, because if you go to another country where things are happening, you think you are free.”

In Los Angeles in the late 1980s and 90s, married now and with a daughter, she set up a fashion line, where Owens’ boyfriend introduced him to her as “the best pattern-cutter in LA”. One day, when she was away working in France, “Somebody banged at the hotel door. I opened the door, it was him, and boom.” Owens and Lamy began an “affair that… It’s sort of incredible.”

When the business faltered, in the 90s, she opened restaurants. Les Deux Cafés was built in a car park in LA. Waiters crossed a busy road to serve diners their food. But it attracted people like Madonna and Al Pacino, and became (wrote the LA Times in 1998) “Hollywood’s hippest hard-to-find spot”, a sort of Studio 54 but with artichoke soup. Bill Murray, one of their investors, tended the bar. Sometimes Lamy would sing, and today she still performs, with her daughter, Scarlett Rouge, and once with A$AP Rocky and Mos Def. She has a meeting with a hip-hop producer tomorrow to discuss a remix. “It’s all about the tribe,” she says, many times.

In the 90s, “There were all these layers of people coming to the cafe. There were the farmers, there were the politicians…” There was Joni Mitchell, “who was arriving at 7.30pm for a cappuccino because she was sleeping during the day and painting at night”. When two people got into a fight there, “they went to court. And the judgment for the one who burned the other one with a cigar was: You cannot go to the cafe for six months. Ha!”

Owens and Lamy married in 2006 – she was 62 and he was 45. Did they meet any judgment? “No! For two years he could not understand what I was saying, but here we are.” Today he calls her “Hun” – not short for honey, but instead, (he explained last year to the New York Times) after the Huns, because, “she’s a marauding, axe-wielding primitive force of nature who takes what she wants and then throws a lit match behind her”.

Pixie rearranges herself sharply on my knee, pushing her waxy head into the palm of my hand. “Rick is always obsessed with dead artists. And I with the ones who were born yesterday.” She laughs, throatily. “We cannot say it’s a relationship or a companionship. It’s more… some kind of flamingo dance where there’s still a lot of seduction. That’s what it is. An admiration for each other. And we fit together. It’s a love story. But I am still trying to be the boss. Still we seduce each other all the time with the work, with the ideas, with whatever we do.” She stubs out her cigarette and immediately lights another. How much does she smoke a day? “Oh, tons. But you see, I like them. And I don’t swallow. It’s a drug that is good for you. When I was pregnant, I only smoked six a day. And after I gave birth, the guy brought me a carton right to my bed.”

We’re meeting the week of Giorgio Armani’s death, and in the wake of creative directors moving houses. The fashion industry is in flux. At the end of Owens’ menswear show this summer he played Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead, which many took to be a comment on breaking news that Anna Wintour was standing down as editor of American Vogue. “Oh my God. This ‘dance of change’,” Lamy says, theatrically. “But I don’t understand this business of ‘houses’. There is an industry, and sometimes you look at it because it could be interesting.” Is Wintour’s departure interesting to her? “No!”

She changes the subject, showing me a book made for her by the artist Anselm Kiefer, a large bust of artist Matthew Barney’s head and a 1.3-gallon aluminum tank containing the sperm of an Estonian rapper. Sighs Lamy, “It’s empty now.”

When we first sat down, the sun filtering through grape vines, the garden of the Ministry of Defence just behind the fence, she wondered, “What will we talk about? It’s difficult to think about anything but war.” She shook her head and rearranged her clothes. “Looking at these old crazies that are running the board. And we thought, what did we do wrong that we got to this point? And why? We do everything we can do. But it doesn’t mean anything.” The weekend we met, at a demonstration in London against the ban on Palestine Action almost 1,000 people were arrested, a large proportion of whom were over 60. “Yeah. Because we went through all this before: the war, Vietnam. I thought there was a new order, a new thing. No. It’s a little more insidious, but it’s the same story.”

The way we see it has changed, though. In our “Instagram world”, she says, you scroll “from a dress, to news from Gaza, to another dress”. And yet: “They used to say if there had been the internet at the time of the Holocaust, it wouldn’t have happened.” She tuts, wetly, and taps her silver rings. On Instagram there is a growing number of rightwing influencers gathering evidence to show that Lamy is a witch. “It’s silly. If I was a witch I could do something about this.” How does she describe her politics today? “I don’t know what to tell you. I still believe in a system where people could talk, meaning elections. But this system was made when people did not have communication. I think everything changed with television, and after that the internet. So the system has nothing to do with the modern world.” Back then, she says, “there was some kind of civilization. Now there is none.”

A retrospective of Owens’ work opened recently at the Palais Galliera. At each end of the show is a small room. The first contains a replica of the couple’s rumpled bed, grey sheets and six pillows in various shades of bruise. The other (upon which is stuck a warning sign) features videos, including one of Lamy pulling down her pants and sitting on top of her 80th birthday cake, laughing. How does she feel about entering her 80s? “Well, I have no notion of time.” But she has started to become shocked when friends “disappear at 70 and people say, ‘They had a good long life.’” She lights another cigarette.

“The first week we moved back, I was on the subway and there is a bunch of kids, with flags, on their way to a demonstration.” She was excited, and followed, preparing to join them. “Then I asked them what they were protesting, and they say, ‘the retirement plan’. Oh my God, it was so sad!” A lot of people, she thinks, “become very beautiful and interesting when they age. Others give up. But then when they are not making the money, there’s the idea they have to be discarded.”

In fashion, youth is beauty, youth is power. She wrinkles her nose at this. “But there is Rei Kawakubo, who is one year older than me and one of the greatest artists of our time, and Vivienne Westwood. The rest is just advertising.” She raises her hooded head. “I mean, I think I look pretty good.”

As evening approaches, her friend, the artist Gena Marvin arrives, with bald, elfin looks and matching black fingers and a bag containing horns that they plan to attach to Lamy’s head. (“Hi, Mama!”) We wander slowly back through the kitchen and the dining room, with its huge mural by her daughter and a Comme des Garçons dress so lacquered it was impossible for Lamy to wear, so it stands as a sculpture.

What is she working on now? “I don’t work. I just do things. The more chaos it is, the better.” The cat sings for her attention as Lamy sees me down the concrete steps. “I just want to keep going.”

Inset photo by Gerald Matzka/Getty Images