In this episode of The Art Bystander, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar enters a conversation with Michèle Lamy and Scarlett Rouge.

Michèle Lamy is often introduced in relation to Rick Owens, but that has always felt like an incomplete way of understanding her.

Born in France’s Jura region in 1944, into a family shaped by the Resistance, Lamy studied law in Lyon, attended the philosophy lectures of Gilles Deleuze and worked as a criminal defence lawyer while also performing striptease and cabaret.

In 1979, she moved to Los Angeles without having visited the city. There she established her clothing line, created Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés, and treated hospitality as a form of theatre.

Around 1990, she hired a pattern cutter named Rick Owens. Their working relationship became a partnership in life, and by 2003 they had moved to Paris and were building Owenscorp together. Lamy’s work has since moved through furniture, jewellery, music, film, performance and boxing. She has variously described herself as a storyteller, performer and entrepreneur, resisting any single professional title.

Joining her is her daughter, Scarlett Rouge, an interdisciplinary artist raised between California and France. The daughter of Lamy and experimental filmmaker Richard Newton, and Owens’s stepdaughter, Rouge trained in photography at CalArts before developing a practice across painting, installation, sculpture, video, textiles and performance.

Her work draws on myth, symbolic language, Jungian thought and ritual, asking how art might reconnect spirit and matter. Mother and daughter have also performed together in LAVASCAR alongside Nico Vascellari.

In this episode, we speak about resistance and freedom, Los Angeles, family and artistic inheritance, collaboration, ritual, commerce and the making of spaces in which outsiders can belong.

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