Installation view, Rick Owens furniture, Tech Glade, from Travis Scott’s Circus Maximus tour, now on view at Salon 94 Design through February 15.
Photo: Olympia Shannon/Courtesy of Rick Owens Furniture and Salon 94 Design/
“I wanted to say good night to honey,” says Rick Owens, smiling in a FaceTime call with Michèle Lamy. While the fashion designer prepares to call it a night in Paris, Lamy, his wife and creative partner, is braving the chilly New York air for a cigarette break on Salon 94’s outdoor terrace. Here, on the third floor of the Upper East Side townhouse, she is figuring out how close she should install their furniture to the ornate Beaux-Arts details of the gallery.
“Why don’t I fucking live here?” the 80-year-old French Algerian designer says she asks herself every time she lands in New York, but she adds: “I am more Bronx and Brooklyn.” This is Owens and Lamy’s return to Salon 94, 15 years after their first show, “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” which reinterpreted the couple’s Paris bedroom. Its standout piece was a curvilinear alabaster bed that embodied the duo’s appetite for breezy sexiness and sculptural heft. This time, their work is moodier: angled wood, marble, steel, ox bone, and antler chairs.
Tech Glade arrived in New York on an invitation from Salon 94 owner Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who has collaborated with Lamy and Owens since the inception of their design business.
Photo: Olympia Shannon/Courtesy of Rick Owens Furniture and Salon 94 Design
Elk antlers, which may weigh up to 85 pounds, tap into the duo’s signature raw, haunted aesthetic.
Photo: Courtesy of Rick Owens Furniture and Salon 94 Design
The title of the show that Lamy is finalizing, “Backstage,” alludes to one of their more recent, larger-scale works, Tech Glade, a room-size installation for Travis Scott that accompanied him on his Circus Maximus world tour. The couple designed what Lamy calls a “soft bunker” for the rapper, with ten modular sofas embedded with a TV, speakers, and a Damien Quintard–designed recording studio. Scott has long been a collector of Owens’s furniture and first asked the couple to design the set and costumes for his Saturday Night Live performance last April. Then came the musician’s invitation to adapt the pair’s Glade seating design, which they first created in 2019, to accompany him on the road. In three weeks, Lamy and Owens designed a one-of-a-kind backstage on wheels and dressed it in their signature French-wool army blankets. The mobile retreat also became a hub for Scott to create new music throughout the tour’s 78 stops.
For Owens, the concept was initially somewhat foreign. “We don’t really have a backstage,” explains the designer — he doesn’t see any difference between his and Lamy’s lives onstage or off. He knew that regardless, “it needs to be just as aesthetically profound and resolved as what is presented to the public.” “Tech Glade,” now installed on the third floor at Salon 94, dominates the room, its wool finish contrasting against the mahogany-paneled walls and carved wood moldings. A wood chair with an antler back that Scott used backstage is also part of the lounge, complete with scratch marks on its seat from the metal-chain details in Scott’s stage costume.
French-army wool has been a staple of Owens’s poetically goth garments — here, the coarsely soft material dresses the furniture’s plywood skeleton.
Photo: Matteo Carcelli
Lamy calls Tech Glade a “soft bunker.”
Photo: Matteo Carcelli
The rest of the exhibit showcases the furniture that came out of their own everyday experimentation. The designers wanted to decorate their Paris home after leaving Los Angeles in 2003 with pieces they made themselves. “The whole idea was to furnish our personal life without a commercial intention,” remembers Owens. “I would throw out an idea, and Michéle would add that we need a footstool next to the couch.” They eventually realized their ideas, many of which are now on view in the show. “This is our way of playing together, and if people are interested, that is the icing on the cake,” he said. Stag Stool Bois De Marais is a triangular bog-wood chair with a spiky moose antler as its back support. Lamy wanted to use materials left behind either by the natural world itself — elk and moose shed their antlers, for example — or those discarded by humans and give them new life as chairs.
A slaughterhouse 45 minutes outside of Paris provided Half Box Chair’s singular material: Carved ox bones are meticulously assembled in a minimalist geometric silhouette. Its boxiness makes it clear that the sitter’s comfort is not a priority. The process of transforming the bones into a chair turned the couple’s studio kitchen into a bloodbath more than once, “but the butchers sometimes brought filet mignon to our team as gifts,” Lamy says. She has never been interested in being predictable or soft, and now, her ideas about beauty and function are even more tactile and organic.
Photo: Courtesy of Rick Owens Furniture and Salon 94 Design
Backstage closes on February 15, 2025.
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