Never one to follow someone else’s rules, fashion legend Michèle Lamy defines couture on her own terms.
Coat, Ashi Studio; rings, Lamy’s own. Photo: Tarek Mawad
Michèle Lamy has an almost mythical presence across the creative industries, her iconographic effect on par with that of Iris Apfel, Iman, or André Leon Talley. Names like these are shorthand for an inimitable vision, evoking a clear and singular image of the figures to which they belong. Lamy – a force in fashion that cannot be categorized – is immediately recognizable by the thick black line drawn onto her forehead daily, her fingers covered in rings and dye, her gilded teeth inspired by the metal bands discovered in the mouths of ancient Egyptian mummies. The French-born luminary of Algerian descent was a defense lawyer before becoming a life partner and muse to Rick Owens, with whom she co-founded their design empire, Owenscorp. As if these successes alone aren’t intimidating enough, her bewitching gaze is darkly outlined, its intensity piercing even over Zoom. But Lamy is warm and funny, sharing that she is at her daughter’s home in Fontainebleau after having been “dancing all night not so long ago.” She is curious in an intellectual and artistic way, as open to dissecting the couture looks from her recent Vogue Arabia shoot as she is to entertaining some of my more existential questions. One of which, she says to my utter surprise, leaves her speechless: Do broken people make better art?
Dress, Viktor & Rolf. Photo: Tarek Mawad
“You ask a very dangerous question here,” Lamy states, “because when you say broken people, what is somebody who is broken?” She thinks out loud about Julian Schnabel, who she heard started painting from bed while he was sick as a child, eventually gaining notoriety in adulthood for his cracked crockery pieces. (When I contact Schnabel about this, he tells me that as compelling as this anecdote might sound, it is in fact false: “I…
