Rose Apodaca

"It's like being a farmer and taking your apples to market," is how Rick Owens reasoned going to New York to show his collection a decade ago, while choosing to cultivate his crops, er, collection from the Hollywood space he shared with his other half, the chicly eccentric Michèle Lamy. That remark he shared with me one late evening always stuck in my mind, especially when the glow of Vogue and, finally, other pubs (including my former, slow-to-move employer) focused on Rick and his unorthodox ideas of glamour and luxury ("glunge," as he cheekily dubs it). By then, however, the pair recognized their field of dreams was not on a dingy street off Hollywood Boulevard, or even in New York for that matter.
It's wild to think that five years have fled since Rick and Michèle left L.A. for Paris. I spent too many nights to recall, partly due to too many bottles of rose, supping at Michèle's Les Deux Cafés, a seminal spot that is nothing like the fatuous incarnation it is today under new ownership. On any given evening in those early days of Le Deux, a tangle of metal chairs would be filled with regulars who included Kim Gordon, Catherine Deneuve, Christina Ricci, Courtney Love, Sofia Coppola, Phillip Roth and artists, musicians and expats. Now you're more likely to rub up against Jessica Simpson and the US Weekly ilk. Ick.
As I told Rick in our email exchange overnight, he and Michèle keep popping up on my radar lately. Of course, there was the recent New Yorker feature. And no sooner had he been the topic at dinner earlier this week, than a video appeared on style.com the next day in which he reveals the raw space for his new Tribeca outpost and his reasons for doing his second shop in the U.S. He opened his first in the Palais Royal in Paris, where he also sells the brutalesque furniture crafted in their incredible five-story office-cum-showroom-cum home in the Place du Palais Bourbon (which, like their old Hollywood digs, doesn't have a kitchen!).
Tribeca is still faraway from L.A., I wrote him, but at least it could mean we'll be seeing more of him on this side of the sea in the coming future. In the meantime, he shared this pic of he and Michèle on their popover to Berlin. It's not quite what painter Grant Wood had in mind, but I'd like to think that all that's missing is the pitchfork.