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Michèle Lamy is walking along a side street in New York's Chinatown, wreathed in cigarette smoke. The late-morning light from a bright, clear November sun is hitting that smoke with sort of a film-noir effect—slowing it, illuminating it as if from within. We have just had dim sum, and in the moments while we await her chauffeured car, Lamy is deep in thought, plotting for the future probably, as she always is, making plans, troubleshooting those plans, imagining new scenarios, thinking up stories to tell. Maybe she notices the smokescreen she has created. Certainly she can feel it, and she begins to sort of play with it, shifting in the lacy arabesques around her, sliding behind them, disappearing from view, and then stepping forward again, a new plan in mind. 

                                                         Image: unique rings wholesale

As long as I've known her, Lamy has appeared to me this way—slightly hidden, shaded, or obscured from total clarity. For much of that time, I have suspected her of cultivating that effect, deliberately toying with the opacity of her image, making herself into a kind of living Rorschach, about whom everyone might have a different understanding. She loves that when visiting New Mexico, say, she was often mistaken for Navajo; when in Marrakesh, Bedouin; or in her native France, Arab. I've wondered if she speaks too with purposeful ellipticalness. When I first met her, and worked as a maître d' at her restaurant Les Deux Cafés in Hollywood during the late 1990s, we talked about our mutual love of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and so I began to think that Lamy's often cryptic, dusky English was meant, like Krishnamurti's knotty and indecipherable writings, to repel my understanding unto the point of some spontaneous and perhaps even unrelated epiphany.

Over the years, I have come to appreciate and celebrate Lamy's elusiveness, collecting along the way the many myths and gossip spun about her like those threads of smoke. Not long ago, I wrote that it has been suggested that, "She's Algerian, a Gypsy; she was born in a resistance camp in occupied France, was raised by wolves in the Ardennes; she's an arms dealer, a vampire, a witch, and she's 1,600 years old (the number is consistent, as if it were exact, vetted by a team of experts)." More often, and more recently, Lamy is described, no more comprehendingly, as a muse—to her husband Rick Owens and others, like FKA Twigs, who cast her in her short film M3LL155X—or as a collaborator, which sounds like a criminal complaint. 

But even if what she does and the way she does it—whether within the company that she and Owens created 21 years ago, or in the projects she creates with her eclectic set of friends and at various art fairs around the world—is confoundingly difficult to describe, it is really rather extraordinary. So it is worth getting at least a few principal points straight: Lamy is in fact 71. She was born and raised in the Alps, near Oyonnax. In Paris, during the '60s and '70s, she worked as a defense attorney and as a cabaret dancer, though not, alas, at the same time. In 1979, Lamy moved to Los Angeles, and over the next 24 years, she proceeded to marry, have a daughter (the artist Scarlett Rouge), divorce, create a cultishly adored clothing line called Lamy (hiring, in the process, a talented pattern cutter by the name of Rick Owens with whom she would fall in love and later marry), and then open two landmark restaurants in Hollywood (Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés). In 2003, Lamy and Owens moved to Paris and began building their now widely celebrated world there. And that really is the crux of both of their works—world building. And so heavy has been their dual impact that it is becoming hard to tell where their world ends and ours begins.

Within Owenscorp, Lamy functions as a kind of foreman, instigator, and all-around special-projects director. She works very closely with the artisans in constructing the furniture, for example, as well as on the jewelry and housewares. But titles are sort of beside the point for Lamy, who prefers to think of herself as an entrepreneur anyway. Her recent creations at Frieze and the Barbican in London, as well as at her upcoming thingamajig at Art Basel Hong Kong this March, could ably be described as pop-up installations, or happenings, in the good old Situationist tradition. At the Biennale in Venice last May, to take one, Lamy gathered a typically diverse assortment of her friends and co-conspirators on a barge for a kind of three-day summit. Below decks, in the recording studio (née engine room), Lamy recorded songs with UNKLE and A$AP Rocky, while on the topside, she and artists and editors from around the world dined in the restaurant amid various installations, kibitzing about art and life and everything and nothing at all. This kind of open-air, open-ended salon is emblematic of Lamy and of her floating global circus. In her life and work (as if one could separate the two), Lamy seems intent on building safe havens, bringing people together, and waiting for the magic to happen.

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