It’s past midnight in Ladbroke Hall’s Sunbeam Theatre. The revellers move under a wash of crimson and the deep hum of electronic music. Into this space comes Michèle Lamy, moving like a current—hostess and high priestess. It’s the launch party for “Rust Never Sleeps,” the latest presentation of Rick Owens Furniture at Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
The exhibition’s title nods to a Neil Young lyric, but Lamy, its curator and Owens’s long-time collaborator, wife, and partner, tips it toward something more elemental: “It’s a good image for what’s going on in the world,” she says in an interview earlier in the day, elevating the standard for how to dress on a Zoom call. “Rust is about time, about resistance, about living through what’s happening—and doing something, not just saying something.”
Lamy describes the show not as a standalone exhibition, but as the continuation of a shared practice that has lasted for decades. “We don’t take out an exhibition like in a museum,” she says. “It’s taking over a space, like a restaurant, with food, drink, fun—all of it together. That’s what life is.” Her notion of domesticity extends into performance: at the Ladbroke Hall party, she serves “deconstructed” lasagne from Pollini restaurant washed down with black mezcal cocktails. “I wanted tonight to feel like the furniture—ritualistic, a bit dangerous,” Lamy says.
“She draws you into her orbit,” says Loic Le Gaillard, co-founder of Carpenters Workshop, looking upon his host. “There isn’t a boundary she can’t break.”
The works themselves—metal seats that resemble relics, slab-like tables, bed-forms framed with antlers—are a Gothic reimagining of London’s Brutalist architecture. Yet there’s a larger conceptual narrative here: the slow, inevitable tide of decay. “Metal into rust,” Lamy says. “That’s beautiful to me.”
She refuses to draw a distinction between fashion and furniture. “We built the first furniture for our own home,” she says. “It was never separate from the clothes. You don’t create unless you’re creating for yourself. It’s all an extension of what you have to say.”
At home, she and Owens are partners in creative tension. “We are the opposite when it comes to buying things,” she says. “Sometimes there’s a piece I can’t stand—but it stays. Or I tell him to buy something, with a push. It becomes part of the story.” They have spent nearly four decades together, married for almost 20 years. What’s the secret? “People who smoke together, stay together,” she says, recalling the day she met Owens in downtown LA. He arrived to work for her with “his nose ring, his Gipsy scarves.” What was her first impression? “The most beautiful creature. It was a very easy thing.”
For younger artists, she offers the simplest kind of counsel: “It’s confidence,” she says, with a shrug. “You take all the risks, and if it doesn’t work, you start again. You do what you believe, and you can never be lost.” The crowd turns towards the woman in their midst, 81 this year. Lamy raises her hand, palm aloft, as if casting a spell. Rust never sleeps.
“Rick Owens: Rust Never Sleeps” is on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London, Oct. 14, 2025 – Feb. 14, 2026.
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