“I fell in a hole, sometimes I’m big, sometimes I’m tall,” says Michèle Lamy, who is comparing herself to Alice from Alice in Wonderland. The multi-hyphenate, who is known for her work in fashion and most notably as the co-founder of Owenscorp alongside her husband, Rick Owens, is calling in from a conference room in Los Angeles. She received a lifetime achievement award at the Fashion Trust US’s fourth annual awards ceremony on Tuesday, and called me before the ceremony to discuss the lifetime in question.
Lamy has been called a witch and an occultist on TikTok. She has been described as a fashion icon, and labeled an entrepreneur and fashion designer. She has practiced both law and striptease with equal fervor. She protested Vietnam while living in the US and was living in France during May 68. She has designed furniture for Kim Kardashian and a backstage lounge for Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus world tour. And yet, despite having experienced enough for a hefty memoir or a blockbuster biopic, she is the kind of person who likes to focus on the future.
“Usually, I look forward,” she says, “but now back, because of [this] life achievement award.” Lamy says she is “very pleased” with the recognition. “But at the same time, I never have a feeling that I made an achievement,” says, though she appreciates the airtime and opportunity to make her voice heard.
“Lately, I understand a little more what is my function in life,” says Lamy, who speaks poetically and with a thick French accent. “It starts from whatever my way of thinking or being became at the time when I was in university.”
Then, Lamy was studying law in Lyon, where she became drawn to the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. “I was supposed to be at the law school next door,” she recalls. Deleuze was working on his famed analysis of Alice in Wonderland at the time, “for which he did a book afterwards, The Logic of Sense,” Lamy says. “I think it’s a great example of what I’m doing, I’m very like Alice. It started from there.”
Travis Scott and Michèle Lamy
Photography by Louis Nesbitt
Erykah Badu, Michèle Lamy, and Travis Scott
Photography by Louis Nesbitt
Lamy worked as a criminal attorney in the late ’60s and early ’70s. “At the time it was to save the world,” she says, “trying to defend people.” “At the same time, I [also] wanted to do striptease,” she laughs—Lamy did strip at French county fairs when she was young, and continued to do so when she eventually relocated to the states, after her stint in law.
“I think I was very afraid I wouldn’t be very useful,” as a lawyer, she says. But she was. “At the beginning, you get a lot of cases of people who give it to you,” Lamy says. “For some reason, they were thinking they’d embarrass me, so they were giving me these sex stories,” she says, referring to sex crimes. “Of course, they were not as big as the Epstein files, but they showed you the misery of the world.”
Then, May 68, the period of uprising and civil unrest in France, comes to her mind. “We were thinking we already changed the word,” she tells me. Then she came to New York, and then relocated to Los Angeles. “We were already in the streets,” she says of protesting the Vietnam war.
Lamy conjures up these moments in her life to make a broader point about culture at large today. Then, the idea was, she suggests, to rise up against threats to the world as they then knew it. If it seemed like it had worked, Lamy thinks we got it all wrong.
“The big problem right now [that] we see is the opposite of what we thought was going to change,” Lamy says, when some leaders are in “total dementia” and “nothing can be done about it.” “What I think,” she says more forcefully, “is what on Earth did we do not to be thinking, 40 or 30 years ago or yesterday, that something like that would happen at this point.”
“Those visions of the astronauts,” she says, referring to Artemis II and the photos of our planet they shared, “were absolutely incredible, but you could see [against] the pictures of Earth in ’72 from Apollo [17], the Earth is now, grayer,” she says. “I mean, wake up. It’s crazy. It’s in front of everybody’s eyes, and then there’s [some] trying to kill populations for oil. It’s very disturbing,” she says. “A life achievement award… you always think that your voice, or what you do, you express it and it’s going in the right direction, but right now it’s a failure.”
Yet Lamy is still hopeful. “But I can never give up,” she says. “There are people who have been fighting all the time, and we are expressing ourselves.”
Only at the tail end of our conversation does fashion come up as a topic. I ask her what she makes of the way the industry has changed. She first mentions Owens’s shows and Rei Kawakubo’s for Comme des Garçons as good examples of self-expression in fashion. Then, she makes something clear: “I don’t like to hear the words brand or industry,” she says, “but I think doing things that you express yourself and do something of the time, is resistance. It’s the way to go.”
Michèle Lamy walks the runway at the fall-winter 2026 Matières Fécales show in Paris in March, 2026.
WWD/Getty Images
She then speaks about the youth. “We have our new kids, Matières Fécales,” she says, who are part of the Owens and Lamy extended creative family. “When we are storytellers, the artist, the poet, the writer, we are the resistance,” she says.
Does Lamy think the world can still be saved? “It’s not with more guns, or AI,” she says. I ask her further about AI. “Yeah, we got fucked up,” she offers matter of factly. We laugh, as do the people off-camera in the room. She then brings up New York, which she says is “better looking” than Paris always, but more so now. “Now, with [Zohran] Mamdani, there is hope,” she says.
Scott and Erykah Badu presented Lamy with her award on Tuesday evening. “We really want to change the world,” she said onstage. “We don’t know what we can do. But we will, we will.” She then introduced Scott and Badu herself, rather than the other way around, and asked the crowd to join her as she chanted: “resistance, resistance.” After Scott handed her the award, she asked Badu for a kiss. “She is the poster child for open heart, for exceptional freedom, for resistance, for non conformity,” Badu said. “You are an inspiration to us all, an example of what freedom looks like.”
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