A Trip Inside Michèle Lamy’s 80th Birthday Rave

An evening of vaporettos, nude go-go dancers, Bjork, caviar sandwiches, and the magnetic octogenarian who brought them all to an abandoned airport.

Michèle Lamy’s eightieth birthday party begins at 11 PM sharp. The pickup location is sent out 24 hours prior on a blacked out minimalist map of Venice. Getting there will be easy if you know where to go. The boats take us to Giovanni Nicelli Airport, where two days before there was a dry run for a very important religious visit. On this brisk Wednesday evening, the area had a similar kind of communion with a different kind of goddess.

Lamy, the wife of Rick Owens and a multihyphenate artist and designer in her own right, summoned nearly 2,000 of her apostles to this vacant airport hangar to rave all night in honor of her turning the big eight-oh. Some came from short distances; artists like Martine Syms and Miles Greenberg were just a vaporetto ride away at the Venice Biennale—“very fun and free,” said Greenberg of the fair. Others traveled from Milan or its outskirts, fresh from that city’s Salone del Mobile—“like fashion week but better because you don’t have to share a car and you can actually have fun,” said one editor. And others traveled across oceans, the photographer Danielle Levitt with her husband and their daughter coming all the way from Los Angeles for the event. (Levitt has been following Lamy for a documentary of the event and its aftermath.)

Collecting the Lamy fans and the Owens heads on the Lido in the middle of the night is sort of like recalling the Avengers to a convention in Middle America. Which is to say, throughout my journey from New York to Venice, I could pick out the black-clad guests, Geobaskets on the plane, Bauhaus jackets in the train station, like beacons among the streamlined corpo-casual wardrobes of the international elite. Here’s a guy at 8 AM at Milano Centrale in head-to-toe Rick Owens, three silver carabiners jangling from his waistband. Here’s another on the ferry to the Lido at noon in a backwards Rick Owens baseball cap and Erewhon tote. To be a part of the Rick-Michèle clan is to never really be alone, a pair of Kiss boots or long beige drawstrings signaling kinship across all borders.That energy of togetherness was Lamy’s goal in the party—you know, beyond having a totally fun, fab, raving time. The day before, Lamy and her team assembled at the airport for a rehearsal of the evening. There I met Rod, “the guy for venues without permits,” who helped secure the space, and a jittery airport attendant who cautiously warned that the airport was still operational and guests couldn’t smoke near the airfield because “we have fuel.”

After battling 20- to 30-mile-per-hour winds at the airport, Lamy sat down to discuss her birthday. “You asked me those questions about my birthday, but there is a reason it’s here, and the reason is it’s at the time of the opening of the fair, so to your questions, I’m not going to answer them,” she said slyly, noting her real birthday is February 5. “Instead I’m going to tell you how I feel: In fact, how I feel is terrible. The world is terrible,” she proclaims, which really says something about the plights of 2024 considering Lamy was born at the end of World War II, studied under Deleuze and participated in Paris’s 1968 rebellions, and weathered the more recent storms of the Trump presidency and COVID pandemic. “I thought I was not going to see this anytime, you know,” she continued, “but at the same time there is a great thing happening.

“You know the Biennale, this year, the theme is foreigners,” she said, drawing parallels between her own life traveling across borders, her heritage—“I believe that genes have memory”- —and her hopes for a free and peaceful future. She hired Palestinian DJ Sama AbdulHadi to open the evening at 11 PM. Lamy joined her onstage to chant “Vive Palestine!” and during our interview the day prior praised Israeli artist Ruth Patir’s protest at the Biennale, closing her official stall until a ceasefire is reached. Even amid a tragic war, Lamy was optimistic about the future.

“I always feel that when it’s the beginning of a decade it’s always good,” she said. “Forty is great, and then 47 is,” she winces and makes a falling off gesture with her hand. “It’s the very, very beginning for me, and so voilà.”Arriving across the starlit canals of Venice—a city so haunted and eternal that ghosts and spirits cling to its architecture—to a dark space clouded in smoke set the tone instantly. Upon arrival six living caryatids writhe on the airport roof, their bodies painted white and their heads covered in black Rick Owens-style wigs. Through the strobe-lit lights in the hangar, four DJ sets by AbdulHadi, Pandora’s Jukebox, Fecal Matter, and Honey Dijon forced stuffy fashion types to show off their oft-hidden raver moves.

At midnight, the crowd stuffed into the VIP area onstage. “I have to check the weight limit,” worried one Owenscorp employee, as guests jumped and grinded, shaking the floor. By 12:55 AM the dance floor was equally packed, a crush of bodies tight together, pulsing and swaying. Owens stood at its center, gazing admirably up at his wife on the stage. A girl next to me excitedly screamed to her friend, “I’m going to tell my children about this!” as she grappled for her iPhone to take a picture of Owens.At 1:02 AM Lamy’s friends rushed through the crowd—“we’re bringing Björk over.” Lamy and the musician burst into cheers of delight at the sight of each other, immediately breaking into full-body dancing. By 2:09 AM an Owenscorp employee Sebastian came to the front of the stage in briefs, maneuvering a horsetail around guests like Anne Imhof, Burberry’s Daniel Lee, Ferragamo’s Maximilian Davis, Juergen Teller and his wife Dovile Drizyte, and the architect Sophie Hicks.

Branded HUN80 beer, energy drinks, water, and mezcal shots in commemorative glasses—“hun” is the nickname Rick has for Michèle—kept the vibe up. Just after 1 AM the food truck serving scrambled eggs and caviar sandwiches turned up to quell the crowd’s urges. At around 3 AM, after ringleading the posing and vamping from the stage, the artist Gena Marvin assumed her position on a go-go platform, her body twisting and thrashing so glamorously and sensually some of the audience just stood in awe.Just then “the kids” were let in, hundreds of students from the larger Venezia area rallying into the party, a cross section of the future generation Lamy is so hopeful for. At 3:47 AM a kid with his face painted white takes a selfie with the pita bread he pulls from his pocket. At 3:48 AM a boy in a grungy gray hoodie is pushed up against Marvin’s dancing platform by a girl in a black cutout tank who begins vigorously making out with him, hands stuffed into each other’s back pockets. A green-haired girl greets an older woman in a tented headdress. In the beams of light that cut horizontally across the party a girl in a construction worker’s hazard-orange jumpsuit is raving deliciously, jumping, pumping, banging her head to Honey Dijon. A bald man probably thrice her age in a button-down and khakis joins her, linking hands, whooshing and dancing together.

Could there have been a better representation of a woman whose generosity and creativity is unmatched? Lamy was humble: “I did not really plan,” she said. “It’s Rick Owens who is giving me a party, so it’s the typical Rick party.” Like any good party a few juicy rumors emerged. Did you hear there was supposed to be an elephant? OK, what about the one that some people fell in the canal trying to catch their vaporetto home? Or the one about the artists trying to get delivery pizza in Venice at 2 AM?Maybe those are true. Maybe they aren’t. But if there is a lesson to be learned for us mere mortals from Lamy’s first eight decades of tenor-setting, it’s that you can’t predict the future. “I never had an overview,” she said of her life’s trajectory. “That’s not me at all.” When asked what she’s proudest of in her life so far—what moment makes her feel a slight sense of disbelief—she smiles, piercing blue eyes locked on mine and says, “I’m sure it will be tomorrow.”