Highsnobiety

It is no easy feat to summarily describe the full breadth of Michèle Lamy’s creative output, an output that spans decades and includes the roles of criminal defense attorney, restauranteur, furniture purveyor, night club entertainer, and high priestess of the cult of Rick Owens, the eponymous fashion label engineered by her husband. More challenging still is to contextualize the performative aspects of Lamy’s work around a performance that she has specifically asked not to be referred to as a ‘performance.’ As the saying goes, ‘here goes nothing.’

Lamy is in town to christen the opening of a Rick Owens pop-up shop at famed Berlin concept store Andreas Murkudis. “I don't know, why is it a performance?” she answers bluntly when we meet to discuss the evening ahead of us. “It's always about having the right people together… it seems in Berlin we are touching, so far, little piece of things, it's like a work in progress. Or perhaps it's going to get somewhere.” Just a few months prior to our meeting, Lamy opened for radical queer performance artist Christeene at a specially-curated show at Berghain, where she delivered a set of Yoko Ono-esque vocal pieces before being wrapped in pillow-like fabric and removed from the stage by a squadron of back-up dancers.

Whether or not one adheres to the terminology, Lamy has spent a considerable portion of the past couple years working within the realm of performance, mostly stemming from her work with LAVASCAR, an experimental noise band consisting of herself, her daughter Scarlett Rouge, and punk-oriented sound artist Nico Vascellari. Their 2017 debut album A Dream Deferred is a jarring journey of fast-pasced, techno-flavored industrial music, tied together by hypnotic sections of spoken word, all of which were sourced from the poetry of Langston Hughes. The trio worked with producer Rocco Rampino, alias Congorock, on A Dream Deferred and their subsequent release Garden of Memory.

Creating these records was a project that “came out of the blue,” and yet it was put together rather seamlessly. “We did the thing in five days, the first album that I really like,” she says. “It’s a different sound. It’s a noise. Nico on the drums, me doing what I think is rap, and my daughter Scarlett with this high voice doing a lot of animal noises.”

Though short her fellow bandmates, Lamy brought Rampino along for her non-performance at the opening of the Murkudis pop-up shop where she distilled the LAVASCAR sound to its essential ingredients. As Rampino proffered an array of the thudding beats from their catalog, Michèle Lamy lit up on the microphone, chanting dissociative lyrics while walking furtively about the space. It was crowded, and it wasn’t long before the spectators up front launched into a dance that was both manic and restrained; as if everyone was ready to mosh but remained keenly aware that a small 75-year old woman was in their immediate vicinity. It was raw, it was chaotic, and it was extremely on brand for the Rick Owens experience.

Some of this was, inevitably, by design. As we continue to discuss the minutiae of performance theory and her practice, Lamy says that she gets “especially excited if I don't exactly know what I'm going to do. It's not improvising, because I know what I’m going to think. For example, the piece at Berghain for Christeene, I was of course super happy but still not exactly knowing what I was going to do before. But being in the place, and when I saw this balcony, it all came together. But we did not fully rehearse it. That was a great moment, it was like when we are hugging each other before we are fighting each other. That was making me very high.”

While categorizing her various projects according to certain parameters is anathema to Lamy’s artistic ethos, I point out that there is one element that seems to definitively separate performance from other mediums: an audience. And even if she shuns the idea of herself as a serious performer, she certainly can’t deny she knows how to work a room, let alone enjoy doing so. In a 2018 interview with i-D, she characterized her magnetic energy as more of a “curiosity” fueled by a “desire to entertain people.”

“I think I was aware a very long time ago,” she says while reflecting on the origin of said desire, “and I didn't know what to do about it. You know, it's all about making another story… my philosophy is like the Thousand and One Nights; there has to be a story for there to be a story, in another story. And there are so many people that you would love to do things together but you don't have the time. So [performing spaces] make a little amount of communion.”

Communion, or more specifically, collaboration, is the crux of Michèle Lamy’s approach to both art and life in general. The beating heart of this spirit is, of course, her relationship with Owens. Their dynamic is one that completely subverts the traditional narrative of an artist and their muse. “It's an extraordinary thing of non-said collaboration,” she says regarding their relationship, “Unspoken. It's spoken with act, the two of us doing things is more important than anything spoken. And he looks marvelous, doesn’t he?” she grins.

We steer our way through all manner of conversation topics, from travel advice (“In the desert, you know, you stop to take a shit, you think you are alone and all of a sudden there are 15 kids around you. This is the thing when you travel.”) to encroaching age (“Perhaps because I am thinking, God I'm old, I'd better do it all now.”) but we settle on the notion that her performative work is possibly not a performance but an installation, in much the same way that she has plotted out her elaborate projects in event spaces around the globe.

On the other hand, who cares what we call it? As the throng of Owens acolytes thrashing with glee at the store opening so vividly proved, Michèle Lamy is doing quite well for herself without knowing exactly what she is going to do.

Revisit our 2018 profile on Michèle Lamy for Highsnobiety Magazine right here.

We Recommend
  • rick owens dr martens
    Dr. Martens Gets The Rick Owens Treatment (Again)
    • Footwear
  • WSR main feb week 2
    From Rick Owens to Converse, Browse This Week’s Best Sneaker Releases
    • Sneakers
  • Straytukay inflatable boots for Rick Owens FW24.
    How Rick Owens' Inflatable Boots Blew Up
    • Sneakers
  • Megan Fox & Machine Gun Kelly wear black Rick Owens outfits in Aspen
    Megan Fox & MGK Return — in Uncoordinated Rick Owens, No Less
    • Style
  • A model wears the white Supreme x Dover Street NYC 10th Anniversary T-shirt
    A One-Off Supreme T-shirt & Rick Owens Reborn: DSM NY's 10th Birthday Drops
    • Style
  • Image on Highsnobiety
What To Read Next
  • Nike air max wallet
    This Ain't an Air Max Sneaker. It's Nike's Newest Accessory
    • Sneakers
  • nike air max day 2024 releases
    Nike Air Max Day 2024: Everything Air Lovers Need to Know
    • Sneakers
  • Yayoi Kusama x Louis Vuitton
    In an Era of Collaboration Saturation, How Do Brands Stand Out?
    • Style
  • END. x HOKA sneaker collaboration 2024.
    Can Anyone Stop HOKA?
    • Sneakers
  • Willy Chavarria FW24 Parfums de Marly
    For FW24, Fashion Got Fragrant
    • Beauty
  • comme des garcons new balance 610 snaekers
    COMME des GARÇONS' Dropping the Perfect New Balance Slip-On
    • Sneakers
*If you submitted your e-mail address and placed an order, we may use your e-mail address to inform you regularly about similar products without prior explicit consent. You can object to the use of your e-mail address for this purpose at any time without incurring any costs other than the transmission costs according to the basic tariffs. Each newsletter contains an unsubscribe link. Alternatively, you can object to receiving the newsletter at any time by sending an e-mail to info@highsnobiety.com

Web Accessibility Statement

Titel Media GmbH (Highsnobiety), is committed to facilitating and improving the accessibility and usability of its Website, www.highsnobiety.com. Titel Media GmbH strives to ensure that its Website services and content are accessible to persons with disabilities including users of screen reader technology. To accomplish this, Titel Media GmbH tests, remediates and maintains the Website in-line with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which also bring the Website into conformance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Disclaimer

Please be aware that our efforts to maintain accessibility and usability are ongoing. While we strive to make the Website as accessible as possible some issues can be encountered by different assistive technology as the range of assistive technology is wide and varied.

Contact Us

If, at any time, you have specific questions or concerns about the accessibility of any particular webpage on this Website, please contact us at accessibility@highsnobiety.com, +49 (0)30 235 908 500. If you do encounter an accessibility issue, please be sure to specify the web page and nature of the issue in your email and/or phone call, and we will make all reasonable efforts to make that page or the information contained therein accessible for you.