Michèle Lamy is a commanding presence – that much I know. But somehow, despite all of the research and preparation that I went through leading up to our interview, it was ultimately fated for me to become utterly dismantled in her presence. Lamy is someone with whom you exchange brief words with, but those same words will linger and mull in your mind for the rest of the day. She exudes an aura that renders the room breathless when she steps in. Everyone is holding their breaths, watching her every move from the corner of their eyes. The melodic lull of her thick, French accent is mesmerizing. As she ambles (perhaps floats) over to the plush, white velvet sofa and sits across from me, she flashes her infamous smile studded with gold and diamond-encrusted insets, and I know in this moment that she is everything that I expected her to be – and more.
As we launch into the conversation, one thing is made vividly clear: Michèle Lamy is a woman of stories. When asked about how she got to where she is today, Lamy tells me about her refreshingly simple outlook, “I think perhaps my philosophy or whatever it is, is 1,001 nights and it’s like I’m telling a story and I think, if I don’t have the next story I’m going to be…” [here, she makes a gutteral sound as she metaphorically slices her hand across her throat]. Instinctively, my eyes grow wide with fascination, of course.
For those who are unfamiliar with her history, Michèle Lamy’s life reads more like a screenplay than a biography. It is May 1968. She describes it as a time of idealism. A time when people wanted to change the world. When she was 21-years-old, she was in law school, her sights set on becoming a criminal defense lawyer. Soon after, she realized that her passions lay elsewhere and she would change the world in a different way. Fast forward to present day and in the years between now and the spring of ‘68, she has opened and ran two cult-status restaurant-cum-nightclubs (Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés), met a young pattern cutter named Rick Owens, and became a fashion icon who has inadvertently capsized every expectation that the industry has thrown at her.
Michèle and Rick have now been together for 29 years. When asked about how she has approached fashion and design through the years, she reflects, “I like to really be with a lot of people and exchange ideas and the best way to be is to do something together, so I’m easily seduced...And when it’s the idea or I want to lead a bunch of people somewhere and do something together, I think that’s generous.” At the end of the day, Lamy believes that art and fashion are one and the same. “Art in a very large way doesn’t really have a category,” she muses. “I like poetry the most and I think even if I love the words, I don’t like it when they make really clear sentences. So the poetry, I think, and the performance – it’s the same thing.”
Even as she discusses the days leading up to the Rick Owens x Birkenstock pop-up at I.T (the launch event for which she is hosting in Hong Kong for this trip), Michèle is undeniably enraptured as she talks about her band and in discussing music with the event’s DJ. It’s all intertwined. The art, the music, the fashion, the culture. For Michèle Lamy, her world is an eclectic one, but it is intoxicatingly hypnotic all the same.
As the interview concludes, I ask if it’s still okay for us to take some photographs on the street below. “Yes, the streets, of course!” Her hands gesture toward the windows, the soft smog-tinted light from the Hong Kong dusk lightly kisses the thick stack of gold and silver rings assembled in layers on her fingers. Fading tattoos on her hands peek through the metallic cracks. She reaches for her jacket as we head down. I turn around to pick up a bottle of water and when I return to face Michèle, she is completely engulfed within a swelling Rick Owens down vest, swallowing her petite figure with undulating waves of fabric. In this moment, the transformation has happened. Here standing before me was no longer Michèle Lamy, fashion icon. Before me was Michèle Lamy, the zeitgeist of modern culture.
