estevezdiary:

discovered a really neat, but very old, article on Rick Owens and Michele Lamy from the New York Times. By the way, this photo is of their old home/studio/store in Los Angeles.

enjoy.

”When we first moved here, before we opened the cafe, and we did not have any money, we used to have toast parties,” recalls Rick Owens, indicating in his soft-spoken way that he’s talking about whole-wheat toast, not Champagne.

”We would go down to the deli and buy salmon and whitefish, and then I would sit at the head of the table with a loaf of bread and a toaster and I would make toast, and we would pass it down, bucket-brigade style, and the guests would put what they wanted on the toast, and that was dinner. We had this industrial refrigerator in the corner with a glass front, and that was the mood lighting.”

Rick Owens smiles. You might say the designer and his French ladylove, Michele Lamy, have come a long way since those dark times, when they entertained in three bombed-out-looking attached storefronts on a side street in Hollywood, but you would be wrong.

That was before the so-called Hollywood Renaissance hit this part of town. Before Lamy built Los Angeles’s hottest boîte, Les Deux Cafés, on a parking lot across the street, and before Sid Grauman’s Egyptian down the block (yes, the very same Grauman of Grauman’s Chinese) morphed into the American Cinematheque, where you can catch an Eisenstein or a Griffith or a fully restored print of Zsa Zsa Gabor in ”Queen of Outer Space.”

In other words, Owens and Lamy have stayed put, and the rest of the world (or at least the most interesting part of it) has come to them. After years of knocking around ”doing knockoffs at knockoff companies,” Owens, 40, started making patterns for Lamy, who had her own clothing line at the time. Since then, he’s been out on his own, designing the kind of ethereal clothes that the ghosts at the Chateau Marmont might wear, Owens being proudly Goth himself. And the world has started to take notice. He’s selling at Maxfield in L.A. and Henri Bendel in New York. He has new Italian backing. And Owens’s fall show in New York was fashion week’s hottest ticket.

read the rest here

see the photos here

wait this is so fascinating.