Michèle Lamy on skateboarding, Anselm Kiefer and dark enigmas

The word polymath is chucked around and mostly misused. But if anyone can fill its vast expectations, it’s Michèle Lamy. Fashion icon and designer, restaurateur, former defence lawyer, boxer, film producer, musician, impresario and evergreen goth; it seems there are few things she can’t do, and few heads she can’t turn.

She’s also been the muse of many, but as Rick Owens (her partner in life and work) once noted, she is never a passive one. Recently, Juergen Teller shot Lamy for System Beauty’s first issue. Teller pictures Lamy at the $60M Los Angeles home of Kim Kardashian. The vibe is gritty, dark and grungy: Lamy’s squatting in the bathtub, slathered in foam, with Kim K lounging above her. Her gold, bejewelled teeth glisten through loosely parted lips. Her head is coated in a clay skullcap. Teller draws out Lamy’s enchanting, raw beauty, immortalising Lamy as an artwork in her own right. “I live for the dark, enigmatic pictures you talk about,” she tells me via email. The shoot took on another life altogether when Teller agreed that the images could be used for a collaboration with The Skateroom, which sees the images now available on a series of skateboard decks (though with the notable omission of Kardashian).

Teller shot Lamy again at La Ribaude, artist Anselm Kiefer’s vast studio complex near Barjac in the South of France. In these pictures, Lamy poses in cave-like terrain, dousing her hair in water. “There is no place on earth as ingenious, tormented, extraordinary built /debuilt. So we were dipping in the mud sometimes or hiding in [what] looked like discarded deconstructions of his,” says Lamy, who first met Kiefer in Croissy-Beaubourg, near Paris, in December 2021, and whose monumental lead libraries inspired her signature blackened fingers. “There is no bigger genius or artist.”

You’re more likely to find Lamy in a boxing ring than a skate park, but the project isn’t her first taste of skate culture. In 2022, she and Danny Minnick recreated some of southern California’s most legendary skate locations in an exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, LA. The same year, Lamyland produced ‘What Are We Skating For?’, an exhibition at The Skateroom and social project supporting at-risk youth outside Marrakech, Morocco.

The new decks are available in two triptychs of 20 editions and one pentaptych of ten, as well as a ready-to-skate deck featuring a key image from the collection (available at a more accessible price point). Ten per cent of sales will go directly towards supporting 7Hills – an organisation based in Amman, Jordan which empowers youth through skateboarding and education. As Lamy concludes, “We are going to give wheels to the kids to give them hope and a future… if we can say so today.”