Photography by Shai Levy
Michèle Lamy is easily one of the most recognisable faces in fashion – complete with heavy eyeliner and her trademark black line on her forehead. Although she wears mostly dark clothing, every possible inch of her petite frame is adorned with jewellery, from gold mouthpieces to bracelets and rings that cover her dip-dyed fingers. The interior design aesthetic she shares with her husband, Rick Owens, may be cold, but Lamy is definitely not. She came to Berlin to open the Rick Owens pop-up store at the Andreas Murkudis concept store and managed to coax an art crowd into surrounding her in dance.
“What are you hiding behind those glasses?” Lamy asks one of the guests in her softly-rumbling French accent, who is reclining against a column with tinted lenses. While many celebrities like to keep a healthy distance from their fans, it seems Lamy almost takes pleasure in catching people off-guard by entering their space. The 75-year-old performer is not afraid to personally invite people to join her under the thumping of techno music as she chants hypnotically about concrete, roses and night creatures – and it works. Lamy turned the showroom into a techno club, even inspiring some to undress in order to move more freely.
Photography by Shai Levy
According to Andreas Murkudis, store owner and friend of Lamy and Owens, the secret to her appeal lies in her sincerity. “She genuinely likes people and people can feel that – this is where the connection comes from,” he says.
The performer’s aesthetic of massive stone, marble and washed-out hides may be somewhere between pre-historic and post-apocalyptic, but Murkudis believes Lamy is more in the moment than most people a quarter of her age. “She reacts to the situations. She won’t tell you when she will start or finish, but when she finds a moment where she feels like she can make a move then she will do it intuitively.”
Although the priestess of the Rick Owens empire resides in Paris, there is a chance that Berliners might see more of her as Murkudis says she enjoyed her last performance at Berghain last year with drag queen Christeene so much that she is itching to do it again.
Check out more images from Lamy’s performance below:
Photography by Shai Levy