ON CRE ATING A BRAND WITH GEN Z APPE AL

If you start your own brand, it’s great to have ideas but what’s really beneficial is to understand how you want to communicate them. I feel like my job really sits between the two areas – I’m constantly selling the idea of myself on the brand, whether it’s through partnerships or product placement. ere are so many brands in the world, it’s important to think about how you di erentiate.

have to constantly worry gives me space to do other aspects of my job.

By Emma McCarthy

To be a new business owner, you need to get to grips with numbers. Because no ma er how good your ideas are, if you run out of cash you can’t turn that into something tangible. I’m fortunate because my mum is my financial director. I love working with her. I trust her so much and the fact that I don’t

Collaboration is the best way to learn. I learnt so much about how huge fashion businesses operate through projects with Gucci and Adidas. My collaboration with Ganni taught me a lot about m erchandising and range planning, but it also made me think about the best strategy for hiring a team. For example, when you’re busy on your own, you might think you need more designers, when in reality a new recruit in marketing may be a be er hire.

I wouldn’t do anything differently, except… Now I always interview people for jobs twice.

I see the Ahluwalia Instagram as a por olio. If I’m talking to someone unfamiliar with the brand, I’m more likely to pull up the IG page than the website. e great thing about social media now is that everyone can market themselves to a global audience without having to go through the traditional channels of fashion communication. It’s not only about your brand’s page but your appearance on other pages, too. Having a presence doesn’t necessarily mean those people are going to buy anything – it’s about building a community.

I never think about creating a trend or designing something so it can go viral on the internet. Everything I do is really research-based, so I care more about whether I’m creating work that will leave a lasting memory in someone’s mind or that people will emotionally connect to.

When I was growing up, there were no Black and Brown female designers Representation is really important to me – to be able to amplify my culture and my community. Fashion for a long time has been Eurocentric. I think a lot of Black and Brown people, especially Gen Z, really resonate with our brand because they see themselves reflected in a way their parents never have.

I think of menswear and womenswear as one collection. A traditionally menswear skew may have a “sister”, but the clothes we produce can be worn by anyone, in any way they want. What makes it di icult to be fluid is that the entire system needs to change, from wholesale buyers through to pa ern cu ers. It’s going to take time for all the di erent elements to catch up.

I don’t want to be called “sustainable”. It’s such a wide term and so reductive. I’m already a Black and Brown woman in fashion, I don’t need another label for the industry to typecast me with. I make clothes the way we should be making them, as responsibly as we can, and I think that my work should speak for itself. Our goal is to be a leader and inspire others. The whole point as creatives is to innovate so that future generations can find an even better way forward.

Partner of Rick Owens, occasional cabaret performer and living art piece, the indefatigable Michèle Lamy takes 180 House

By Bryony Stone

or her entire life, Michèle Lamy has defied easy definition. But since this is a portrait of the artist, let’s begin. For the past three decades, Lamy has worked with her business partner and husband Rick Owens to build OWENSCORP. Ostensibly a luxury fashion and furniture business, OWENSCORP has come to function beyond the purely transactional, elevated to near-spiritual status by hoards of devotees who worship at the altar of Rick and Michèle.

Lamy, the co-founding partner and managing director art/ furniture at OWENSCORP, has her role in the brand’s shows and gives her perspective on every part of the production. In this guise, Lamy advises her well-known friends on interior design. Her taste, if her Parisian home and OWENSCORP’s furniture output is anything to go by, merges the angular with the sculptural; concrete Brutalism with raw natural materials, including bone, marble, alabaster, bronze, leather and the occasional moose antler. “It sounds eclectic when I talk about it, but rappers are the poets of our time,” Lamy says. “I like to talk with poets; they leave a lot to the imagination, but it feels more resonant for this moment. I think the world is ge ing pushed forward by artists.”

OWENSCORP is a sensibility; a darkly poetic mode through which Owens and Lamy engage with the world they inhabit. It is housed in a five-storey building which, in a former life, was the administrative headquarters of the French Socialist Party. As our conversation begins over Zoom, I find Lamy at home, framed by the camera in front of a swirling mural painted by her daughter, Scarle Rouge. She is dressed in a long-sleeved jumper in her now-signature black (Lamy wears a combination of bespoke pieces created by her husband and archive Comme des Garçons), with a line of charcoal kohl streaked vertically down her forehead. Her fingers are tipped down to the first knuckle with a midnight black Japanese dye made from vegetables, and e very digit is ta ooed and stacked high with silver rings.

Dangling between her first and second fingers is a whitetipped cigare e, smoked and replaced at regular intervals throughout our hour-long conversation.

Michèle Lamy is a woman always in motion. She’s not one to dwell on the past, but during her years on this earth, she has lived one thousand lives. Born in Jura, France, her grandfather made accessories for French fashion designer Paul Poiret, who is o en credited with establishing the modern fashion industry. Lamy studied philosophy under poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze and worked as a defence lawyer and a cabaret dancer before moving to New York and onwards to Los Angeles, where she launched her mononymous clothing line Lamy, hired Rick Owens as a pa ern cu er and opened Too Soon To Know, a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.

With her first husband Richard Newton, Lamy launched two restaurants in Los Angeles: French bistro Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafes, a two-storey 1904 Arts and Crafts bungalow situated in Provençal-style gardens with interiors designed in partnership with Hollywood great Paul Fortune –who later went on to design the interiors of the Tower Bar on Sunset Boulevard. Taking notes from old-world Hollywood nightlife haunts including Chasen’s, Scandia and Brown Derby, Les Deux Cafes was a den of iniquity. Situated in a former parking lot, hidden further still behind an unmarked steel door, Les Deux Cafes a racted a crowd of the biggest celebrities of the 1990s – among them Heath Ledger, Al Pacino, Nicole Kidman, Ridley Sco , Lenny Kravitz, Madonna, Bill Murray, Gore Vidal, David Lynch, Pu Daddy and Doug Aitkin – who came perhaps less for the food than to drink and dine in proximity to Lamy; to experience her unpredictable, riotous allure and to feel part of her world, if only for one night.

Lamy’s tiny frame – usually elevated by vertiginous leather pla orm boots – is impossible to miss at art fairs, where she has carved a path as a curator with a succession of bargebased events mirroring the unpredictable, interdisciplinary nature of the 1960s art movement Fluxus. At Frieze London, Lamy helmed Bargel, a cruise-turned-floating party; at the n April, Lamy is set to appear at the Soho Summit, the festival of ideas spanning design, art, technology, fashion and sustainability held at Soho Farmhouse. “It was a surprise to me that I was [asked] to do Soho Summit, but at the same time I am so excited about it,” she says. “Soho House is not an obvious Rick Owens world, but it is completely my world. We put each other in each other’s worlds, just for a glimpse or to react to something.” Just don’t expect a keynote speech. “I already have someone in mind that I would like to do something with,” Lamy says. “ is world is important to me. It’s coming from Les Deux Cafes and going to Soho House, being with artists who are creating their environment and sharing a part of their world with installation and live performances.” 180 House, where this photoshoot took place, happens to be one of Lamy’s favourites. “I love going to 180 Strand whenever I am in London because there is everything that I like over there,” she says. “ ere is also 180 Studios, where the headquarters of Je erson Hack are. And they organise the best art exhibitions… I can go on and on.”

Venice Biennale was Bargenale, a barge docked at Certosa with a roster of guests including A$AP Rocky and UNKLE founder James Lavelle; at the Barbican in London, Bargican became part of Doug Aitken’s art project Station to Station In his Fluxus manifesto, founder George Maciunas laid out his vision for a movement that would fully integrate art and life, creating a “living art, anti-art…NON ART REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dile antes and professionals”. Lamy embodies Fluxus for the present day, becoming the catalyst for collective experiences which force unlikely guests together by demanding active participation.

For LAMYLAND – the umbrella term for all of Lamy’s creative endeavours – she pushed the concept further by placing a boxing gym inside Selfridges London for a performance in which boxing became an unlikely vessel for cultural, spiritual, social and ultimately existential questions. Lamy herself has practised boxing for over 40 years, citing Downtown New York’s Overthrow Boxing Club as her favourite place to train. en there are her musical performances, best showcased perhaps by Lavascar, the noise band she formed with daughter Scarle and artist Nico Vascellari. “I enjoy performance, singing,” she says.

With her 80th birthday edging ever-closer, Lamy shows no signs of slowing down. For the inaugural issue of System Beauty, she was shot for the magazine’s cover by Juergen Teller and captured in conversation with artist Anselm Kiefer. “Perhaps they put me on the cover because I’m the only one who hasn’t had any surgery,” she laughs. “I am not the specialist of beauty products or beauty… I think it was giving a spirit.” Reflecting on her life, Lamy tells me, “I am happiest when I bring things together and a er, in the li le time of quiet but when you know already that something else is going to happen. I am like One ousand and One Nights –there is one story, but it is followed by another one. I always think tomorrow is going to be so exciting.” Lamy considers herself lucky, but not as the recipient of pre-determined luck or cosmic destiny. Put simply, she exists in thrall to her instinct and her desire to experience every facet of life. “I’m seduced; I want to follow, I want to participate,” she says. “ ere are so many things to do; it could be boxing or participating with the greatest architect in the world. I can’t say it was luck, but at the same time I feel lucky.”

All of which is to say, Lamy is insatiable and indefatigable. “I’m always ready to see something new and make sense of it later,” she says. Her formidable image commands not only magazine covers but, in late 2022, a series of screenings on billboard spaces at London’s Piccadilly Lights and in Berlin, Melbourne and Tokyo. e film, titled LIMBO, was created in partnership with the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) and directed by Amanda Demme and Mollie Mills. It depicts an unretouched Lamy lying on her stomach on crumpled linen bedsheets. Her gaze is unwavering, her voice silent; she is both subject and audience, the watcher and the watched. “Beauty is being yourself,” she says. “To be naked at Piccadilly Circus, having this voice that CIRCA gave me… I hope people understood what I was trying to say, because being me in this moment in time, I thought it was the thing to do.”

She is the antithesis of the voiceless female muses who sat for portraits by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood — women who were artists themselves but unable to access formal training due to the restrictions of their gender. Instead, Lamy considers herself a “companion” to Owens. “ ere is a routine; it’s a continuation of the story,” she says. at story has been wri en and re-wri en many times over the three decades since the pair met in Los Angeles, when Owens started working for Lamy. In 2017, Rizzoli published Rick Owens: Furniture, which opened with the following quote from Owens on Lamy: “No one makes me lose it like the Hun.” eir union endures, at least in part, due to OWENSCORP, which functions as a shorthand for their shared commitment to challenge and disrupt. Lamy’s politics are transmi ed through gatherings and performances, which range from quietly political (consider the radical undercurrents of her silence at Piccadilly Circus), to the overt, such as WHAT ARE WE SKATING FOR? – a 2022 skate art show with the mission to raise funds for a new skatepark build in Tameslouht, Morocco. “I am trying to do something and participate in the good side of humanity,” she says.

Michèle Lamy spent her 79th birthday in Egypt with Owens, cherishing stillness; that rarest of states. “We were staying in this place – we didn’t even touch a tomb!” she says. “We were more in the mood to be very quiet, to not do much. Enjoying the same thing, talking, reading and being in this remote place.” Lamy travelled to North Africa when she was around 17, where she saw Berber women with ta ooed faces – an ancient signifier of tribe, social and marital status. “I’m a nomad,” she says. “It’s why I feel super well in the desert, carrying everything with me in case I decide not to come back. My rings, my bracelets, everything I need to survive!”

Ask an average person what it means “to play” and you’ll probably get an answer which alludes to having fun and laughing with friends until stitches set in. An actor, however, might take a di erent view: to play a role is to fully inhabit another character; to express their “truth” even when it’s a work of fiction. For Andrew Sco , though, there’s no in between. All work is all play.

“I don’t think I’ve ever played a role where there’s no comedy,” says the 46-year-old, who is taking the stage at this year’s inaugural Soho Summit, held at Soho Farmhouse. Keep in mind that this is a man whose CV includes turns as the criminal mastermind Moriarty in subject and circumstance of a project make the process of bringing a character to life more challenging. Such was the case with Ripley, a new Ne lix series adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel e Talented Mr. Ripley, in which Sco plays the titular character.

“It was an extraordinarily di icult job to do. He’s a very intense character,” he says of the charismatic con-man-turnedmurderer, whose swindles lead to a life of isolation and paranoia. It didn’t help that filming took place in New York and

By Olive Pometsey

hunker down and give up my life. I [felt] so lucky to play the part that there was no choice but to just succumb to it.”

Did Sco take a well-earned break once filming wrapped? Not quite. Instead, it was back to London for Andrew Haigh’s new film Strangers, also starring Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. An adaptation of Japanese writer Taichi Yamada’s novel of the same name, the plot follows Sco ’s Adam, who begins to see his dead parents a er an encounter with Mescal’s character, Harry.

Actor Andrew Sco on his creepy new role in Ripley and what it was really like working with his old mate Paul Mescal

Sherlock, a broken lieutenant in Sam Mendes’s World War I film 1917 and Shakespeare’s tragic hero Hamlet, at London’s Almeida theatre in 2017. “You know, Hamlet is a really funny play –all great tragedies have good comedy as well,” he argues. “One of our unique traits as human beings is our ability to be able to have a sense of humour, so when you’re representing humanity, that’s a very important thing to remember.”

Finding the funny isn’t always easy. In an ideal world, it’s already wri en into the script – see Sco ’s internet-breaking role as the “hot priest” in Phoebe WallerBridge’s Fleabag. But sometimes, the

Italy during the pandemic, uprooting Sco for a year with li le opportunity to see friends and family. “I’ve never been away for that long. I found it really tough.” e actor o en found himself alone on set, too. “Usually, TV shows are about couples, families, a police department –groups of people,” Sco explains. “ is one was unusual in the sense that it’s based around one man. I was on set the whole time, with long shooting days, so it was hard to escape the character.” A er work, Sco would “draaag” himself to the gym, eat, then go straight to bed. On weekends, he’d make up for the sleep lost during night shoots. “I just had to e shoot for Strangers was a li le more relaxed. “We were just having a laugh. I love Claire and Jamie, and Paul is a great friend,” he says of his Oscarnominated co-star and countryman. “It was wonderful to work with him – you do have a shorthand. We know a lot of the same people and we’ve been brought up in the same culture.” Plus, being in the city he calls home helped Sco to regain a sense of normality: “I would get the Tube to work because I was so happy to be back in London.”

Since then, Sco ’s had a chance to flex his funny bone in the more traditional sense. Last year, he appeared in the Lena Dunham-helmed comedy Catherine Called Birdy opposite The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey. And the day before we speak, fans caused a Twi er frenzy a er they spo ed Sco filming Back in Action around Richmond, London –a Ne lix action-comedy with Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. Sco delicately evades any attempts to glean more information about the project. e most he can give away: “It’s been good fun.” e playful spirit sounds like it’s here to stay, then. Sco is able to find joy in every project because, ultimately, he knows that good art celebrates the highs and lows of human existence, even when one threatens to eclipse the other. “ e great gi of my job is to be able to understand why somebody might behave the way they do. It’s not about what you think you see, but what you actually see,” he concludes. “I’m just endlessly fascinated by the idiosyncrasies and the surprising nature of people.”