Michèle Lamy: I’d like to start with a quote you’ve used in your work: “To chase the Pacific Horizons, I’ll need an infinity of lives.”

Michael Bullock: It’s great to start with this line, which is very important to me. It comes from Garden of Memory, a show Etel Adnan did with Simone Fattal and Bob Wilson at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech in 2018. I rediscovered her there. They gave me the rights to use all her poems. Sometimes I use her work as a dictionary when I’m writing songs. I used that line in the song “Infinite,” which I made with my band Lavascar [whose other members are the artist Nico Vascellari and Lamy’s daughter Scarlett Rouge]. Lately, I’ve been recording some of Adnan’s poetry with Travis Scott and Playboi Carti. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, this multiplicity could be seen as schizophrenic, but the way Adnan puts it is similar to how I’ve made my world — an infinity of lives.

I recently learned you started out as a lawyer.

It’s true. I went to law school in Lyon, and just next door, at the Faculté des Lettres, I took Deleuze’s philosophy course on Alice in Wonderland. I think that if there’s something that marks my view of the world, and perhaps explains why I go from one thing to the next, it’s this. Like Alice, I get bigger or smaller, I fall into a hole and it’s a new adventure.

What type of law did you practice?

I was a criminal attorney. I was attracted by the theater of it all. When you start, the bar makes you do pro bono work to help people. In Lyon, I had a lot of sex-crime cases, and then I practiced in Paris a little bit. This was the time of women burning their bras. In the spring of 1968, we thought we were going to change the world. I don’t regret studying law, because it was a great way to see the misery of our world. I think everyone should see these things when they’re young.

Why did Deleuze care about Alice in Wonderland?

It’s very relevant. Everyone knows Alice in Wonderland, and Deleuze uses the story in his book Logique du sens [1969], which, for me, felt like surfing [for Deleuze, Alice’s changing scale and language show how sense emerges from shifting relations rather than a fixed identity]. Alice falls down the hall, encounters the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts, and though not exactly sure where she is, she knows she belongs. And that’s the thing with life. You can’t really have a plan. It’s a lot of encountering people, talking with people, experiencing things — love of life in all directions. So when I say I'm Deleuzian, this is more my parcours.

Deleuze refuses the idea of essence. For him life is about production — differentiation without end, a becoming that never congeals into a final self. With Guattari, he invented the concept of the rhizome, a model for thinking that is nonlinear, anti-hierarchical, and heterogenous. Cut a rhizome and it proliferates, rupturing and reforming without losing momentum.

You said it all. It’s very much like this. In a way, Adnan believed our civilization will survive only through immigration — without new concepts and approaches, it will die. To me, what we’re seeing now are the last fights of a civilization run by the hetero-male order. I think that’s also why people are so against immigration — they fight to the death to protect their superiority. But back when I was studying with Deleuze, we believed in living theater. We wanted to travel without passports. There was a lot of hope with Europe, and today we have the reverse. What’s so difficult about everyone being together? Because we want to maintain our culture, and also want to mix it up. It’s pretty tough.

One more from Deleuze: “A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason or it can be thrown through a window.”

What was important about this is that a concept is not something in the cloud. A concept is something that exists, so when it’s no longer useful you can throw it out the window and make all of society better.

What concepts intrigue you lately?

I imagine I’m like the rest of the world, wondering what the fuck we can do right now — but in relation to Deleuze and the fashion universe, my Rick Owens world. There’s something very important in that, because with fashion you see the time you’re in much more. Deleuze talked about the majority and the minority. The majority tries to run things. People get stuck in a certain way of being. And when you feel you are part of another tribe, you express yourself within the minority. For Deleuze, the minority has to be very active. It’s a positive force. I think it gets to a point where everything is going to change, and all these minorities will melt together. You can recognize it in how other people think. Yesterday, a guy dressed in Ralph Lauren came into the Rick Owens Paris store to buy something there for the first time — an American from San Francisco, but based in France for a very long time. He told me it took him 15 years to dare to enter our store. He was tempted but afraid. So maybe that means he’s ready to think in a different way. That means something. It’s nice to walk into openness.

I like your conception of a minority as a positive force, something that pulls people into new ways of being. Clothing is one approach, entertaining is another. Was that the case at Les Deux Cafés?

Yes. My grandfather was a famous chef. Talk about organic — it was organic or nothing. On his side of the family, you couldn’t eat peas after July 14th because they were a little too hard. I couldn’t really cook, but we knew how to make a story around food. What was fantastic for me in L.A. was that all these clever people had started farming. The Hollywood Farmers Market was so important, and the farmers understood what we wanted at the café. We had tomatoes that other places didn’t — a long heirloom variety that was purple with yellow stripes. Instead of me having to go to the market at 5:00 in the morning, they started to deliver produce to us at 11:00 at night so they could come to the bar. We closed at 2:00 a.m., and the farmers then slept in their cars until 5:00 when they started at the market.

I read something very nice about Les Deux that said it emerged as a hotspot of ostentatious degenerate glamor, equal parts Provençal bistro and backdoor cabaret.

There were so many creative, fantastic people at Les Deux Cafés, but the farmers were also there. For me, all of those layers are why it was such a success. The farmers were part of the scene. It was absolutely a theater of life. Even the politicians would come. There was one who came to Les Deux to listen to the election results and celebrate his victory. Page Six only talked about us if Madonna was having a birthday party there, but what was important was that all these people were mixed together.

Why did you name it Les Deux?

I thought of Les Deux Magots in Paris and Les Deux Garçons in Aix-en-Provence. Usually, when a restaurant is called Les Deux, it’s still there 100 years later. Things didn’t turn out that way for us. It’s all Rick Owens’s fault — he wanted to show in Paris, and here we are.

What was your design concept for Les Deuxs?

Before it opened, it was just a parking lot. I brought in stone, concrete, a fountain, water, vegetation from L.A., like orange trees, which made it feel French. There was something very Hollywood about it. The kitchen was all concrete too. It became a kind of signature. We have the same thing here in our house in Paris. It’s an old Napoleonic building, and behind it there’s a concrete bunker that used to be the Socialist Party’s headquarters. We always like that mix of histories and materials.

Before Les Deux became the toast of L.A., you’d founded a clothing line, and hired Rick Owens as a pattern cutter in 1990.

When I moved to L.A. in 1979, sight unseen, I started making clothes because I couldn’t find anything I liked — nothing that felt right to me between the French style and what was available there. But I was always doing parties. I’d always had this thing about making a space where food, music, and people could come together. When I opened the café, in 1996, I still had the clothing company, but eventually I closed it. That happened after I hired Rick — he killed me because he was better. [Laughs.] On one side we had the clothes, and on the other the restaurant, the parties, the theater, the exhibitions. That was the spirit. Hollywood Boulevard was very alive then. Everything started from there.

I’ve observed you hosting and watched you give each guest your focused attention. What makes a good host?

I don’t know exactly. Even when you do it unconsciously, it’s like casting a movie. You create a story in your head for that day, for that moment. I loved having parties in Hollywood, because people were going out all the time. To see people was part of life. To host, you need a lot of curiosity. You can have Travis Scott with Matt Lambert and Christeene, and at the same time someone from the Pompidou, a curator, maybe an actor, but you can’t exactly direct it. With out parties, there’s never really a host. We never send out anything formal. It’s always about the pleasure of creation, of spirit.

I’ve heard you’re drawn to places like boxing rings, skateparks, burlesque clubs, and classic French bistros. These social spaces are very specific, with distinct energies — macho, erotic, classic.

I boxed for years. A ring is a nice stage. With the boxing gym we did at Selfridges in 2018, we organized for kids on the outskirts of the city to come. Boxing is a great way to get teenagers off the streets. The sport has evolved — lots of women and girls do it now, which is changing the whole spirit of the thing. As for skateparks, I’ve been working with The Skateroom on a collection of skateboards in collaboration with Jeurgen Teller, to support kids in refugee camps and help little girls start skating. We built a skatepark for at-risk youth outside of Marrakech, where it’s against the law to skate in the street. If I’m still alive, one day we’ll go to Gaza and build a skatepark there.

You’re also the driving force behind the Rick Owens Furniture line.

Yes, I develop, produce, and show it. It started with what we built for the house here in Paris. The only thing we brought from L.A. was our books, so we had to make all our furniture. A gallerist who was selling designers like Charlotte Perriand noticed it during on of our parties and thought it would make a nice collection.

How did the Tomb Stag Chair first come about?

We made the first one with a moose antler. It’s still here at our home in Paris. The prototype was more like a bench with plywood, concrete, and some petrified wood from Pakistan — very rough, simple materials, but built like it was from the 18th century. You can’t import the antlers anymore. They come from Canada. I don’t want to reveal too many of my secrets, but the animals shed them naturally.

So no moose are sacrificed to make the chair?

No, no, no. They shed them annually. Our materials are ethically sourced byproducts.

Your furniture often feels like an artifact or a ritual object. It’s as if it could belong to ancient culture.

You picture it in a tomb, you mean?

Maybe in a pyramid. How do you see it?

You could think of the furniture as brutalist. The concept is that everything fits into itself. We don’t use nails. Each Prong, for example, looks like a tooth. So there’s a table, but when you lift it, it’s resting on another table. They fit together perfectly. It’s not glued. It’s not nailed together. It’s sort of resting — heavy but floating. This morning I was at our workshop outside Paris. All of the clothes are made in Italy, which is why we also have a place in Venice, but 90 percent of the furniture is produced in our Paris ateliers. We work with lots of great artisans who are skilled with all different kinds of materials.

The sensibility you developed with the furniture has expanded into other areas.

It continued from there with installations, projects, and collaborations, like the portable backstage studio for Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus tour, which ran from 2023 to 2025. I’ve been consulting with him on stuff. I had turned Glade, our modular system that you can put together to make a sort of huge couch, into a recording studio in London. In the meantime, Travis, who had been buying furniture from us, called one day and asked if we could adapt the studio design for his Saturday Night Live stage. He also told me he was going on tour three weeks later and hated hotels and backstage spaces. He asked what we could do. I said, “I have something.” He traveled with it for almost his whole tour of Europe. It took 18 trucks to move it around. He made music in it after his shows. He even slept in it. We recreated it at Coachella last year — that was more of a lounge, showing his world. I’m a groupie sometimes, so I started recording a few songs there too.

Tell me more about how you choose someone to work with. For instance, the filmmaker Matt Lambert.

I remember the first time Matt came in and showed us what he’d been doing. Christeene wanted to do a video for the song “Butt Muscle,” and Rick said he’d produce it, with Matt and me. I was just supposed to pass by, but it turned into this whole story, with Christeene dancing naked, attached [by a buttplug] to Rick’s ponytail. It took forever to take out, but it drew us closer together forever. The “Butt Muscle” video is fantastic.

Rick, of course, is the central collaboration of your life. You started back in the late 80s, so it’s been almost 40 years. Few people achieve that level of partnership.

Between us, there are some things that are very abstract, and others that are very specific. The furniture is specific, for example, and then there’s a mood. Often, it’s in the look of the eyes. It’s turning a skirt into a top. It’s not something that we write on paper. It’s loose, and it changes over time. First I was doing the clothes, then he came into the picture and he started doing them, then I found the buildings — we created an environment together. And either it fits and we do it or we say “fuck you” for this or that. It’s a love story. Life, work, it’s all the same. I like to run around a lot more than him, or I see something through his eyes and I absorb it, and turn it into something. I stick with the tribe and push it. I don’t know what to say. It’s pretty amazing.

You’ve described it less as a division of roles than as a shared ecosystem — a way of moving through the world together. With that in mind, what are you most looking forward to right now?

I’m trying to figure out how we can have a voice — and more than a voice — to change the world. That’s the plan.