Michèle Lamy: Life is like a book of poems

The agent warned me in advance that Lamy never speaks linearly and uses English in a very free style, in addition to the hardest French accent imaginable. She can skip through four to five topics in a single sentence without contiguity. It is often not entirely clear whether she agrees with or refuses something. But all this is the core of her creative life attitude. She starts without even leaving me enough time to ask the first question.

We have a burning desire to participate in the architecture biennial by being part of an activation that is a floating cinema on the lagoon. It will definitely be on the water. Venice is the only city that has already somehow got it together. They are used to it in Venice, they came up with the word quarantine, they experienced the plague and everything else. It was said that the city would sink, but the water would come, they would dry it out, and they would move on. Venice is a place of hope.

We have another project in New York with Jeanne Greenberg at Salon 94. We live and try to respect everything we can to enjoy it. And that's the answer to how to proceed, do it differently. We have created something like a couch, where a lot of people can be together, but at the same time protected. It's about army blankets and mattresses and about today's time when we want to feel safe, not show off. It's about being together and communicating, encapsulating yourself. Everyone there has their own cocoon.

I attend. I'm provoking something. It was the same when I had Les Deux Café in Los Angeles in the 1990s. Stories took place there every day and on all levels. There were farmers from the market next door, sitting in a bar in the evening, there were screenwriters who felt and wrote it all down somehow, there were people from politics, from the music industry, there were business contracts. It was something that was much easier in Hollywood, much less hierarchy, than, say, here in Paris.

I moved to L.A. without ever being there before, and when I arrived in Venice Beach, I thought I had seen it before, because it was like in Bob Wilson's plays, the same light as in Deafman Glance. I've always wanted to go to the States and I often went to New York, but my brother told me you wouldn't be able to afford anything in New York, L.A. is like New York on the Riviera. I like both and I couldn't stay at the Chelsea Hotel forever. It was because of the music, because of the language I speak so badly in terms of accent, but which I understand in all its senses, and in literature. Everything was right there at the time. After 68 in Paris, later in the 1970s, it turned back to the same thing. I left the cobblestones in Paris and flew to the beach. "Sous les pavés, la plage!"

I'm definitely better at other people's dramas. Life is not like a book - one chapter after another - but more like a book of poems - they are each different, but there is one voice. I hope that's it.

I love it. Devise how to build a scaffolding structure on a ship, and then deal with the guys who build it. But there's just a spark and it gets in my stomach and I'm like that, and if it doesn't, maybe I'll explode. But now that you're forcing me to analyze it - I've always talked about Deleuze, but it's true, I have it all from him. It opens up. It's a rhizome. Something grows horizontally on the ground and then comes the impulse to pick it up, and that is the way it is and that is the way it goes on. I still think, tomorrow it will be even better and much more fun and so on, but it can go in any direction.

When I studied law and practiced law in Paris years ago in Paris, I thought we would change the world with this approach. But suddenly someone came and said we have to go pick mushrooms, and I thought, I have to go pick mushrooms too. So, I quit and went to pick mushrooms. But it's true, it's not some metaphor for those mushrooms.

And it's also political, I don't like hierarchies. I'm not monitoring anything, maybe I'm monitoring something with my body, oh, I'm coming from Mauritania, like a princess on a ship. What I understood in '68 from Maoism was this. It's the same with gender. Already in France, the most creative people around me, in whatever they did, were always transvestites.

When Rick and I were spending the first lockdown, everyone in the fashion world started talking about what would happen next, and we also started asking people we respect, "What are we fighting for?" There are people like Telfar who pioneered change to the system way before the pandemic, and there are big companies here that want everything as before. We keep talking about the pandemic, as if it had never happened before, and we pretend that in the end everything would be like eighteen months ago. I think everything will change, but not immediately. Hierarchy is not hype. Hierarchy is not the way forward. We will not revolutionize now. That's not the way either. We are all just trying to go the soft way we can and bring it pleasure. And now we add skateboarding to that.

Yes, when I opened a boxing club in Selfridges two years ago, whose interior, punching bags and shorts were made by artists and designers, it was a success. Now we have another project with skateboarding. We make furniture, so there will be an event called Ride my Furniture, there will be skateboarder Dustin Dollin, who looks like Bob Dylan and rides like a poet, and artist Erwin Wurm. The proceeds will be used to build a skate park twenty kilometres from Marrakesh. We want to teach the girls there to ride a skateboard, but the main part of the money goes to education, of course. I have always loved surfing, it is elegant, physical. Boxing is like dancing, you look each other in the eye, which is why today it may become such a women's sport. Life is fluid, when you let it go, it changes on its own.

It's very expensive furniture. But definitely, if you live with a high ceiling, you are someone else. It's the same with clothes. It creates layers, sometimes you are part of it, sometimes you are not, and that may be right. You can become who you want to be.

So, it's a question of feeling belonging somewhere. As before subcultures. When there were still some. Cultures. There are a lot of dinosaurs out there, but it's important to understand why their stories succeeded. Look at Chanel, for example. What started was something that completely changed the culture.

And we put the antlers on them, and it works. At the beginning it was a series for our house in Paris. It is a perfect example of the cooperation of our two characters. Then it became a collection, but it's still based on what we somehow need at home. And then I buy some art and we argue.

Never, and Rick is exactly the same.

I have the best ideas here on the fifth floor. There is a bathroom and a hammam, and very early in the morning I always think of something in the steam. But in the same way, when I'm in Shanghai, for example, I'm walking down the street, I'm in a shop, I'm just doing such a performance out of nowhere. I always feel like I want to belong where I am. And the moment you become part of a story, you get the idea of what you could do. Performance is important in this regard, the ecstasy.

Yes, they both do performances, performances. When I did Les Deux Café, it was a performance every day.

I recited poems with a musical background. And when I do that and I'm on stage, it's like I'm just there. Sometimes when you perform or record in the studio, you seem to get into that story.

When I arrived in L.A., I couldn't find anything for myself. Either the spooky festive robes were worn, or jeans and shorts. Nothing in between. I wanted something elegant, simple. It was such a store concept, one size, quality material. Nice, muted colours and not too many pieces. It went well. Then I hired Rick and you know the rest of the story. It was all a coincidence and probably a good idea.