“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.”
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.