Michèle Lamy is a shapeshifter. An ageless entity, she’s taken various forms: defence lawyer, cabaret dancer, political rebel, designer, and restaurateur – as the owner of two cult Los Angeles establishments, Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés.

In her later years, Lamy has settled on her most recognisable form – adding artist, furniture enthusiast and boxer to her repertoire. Often appearing amid a haze of cigarette smoke, her signature look is uniquely her own: smudged smoky eyes, blackened and tattooed fingers – inspired by Berber women of Morocco – with gold and diamond-encrusted teeth that glint and gleam with every raucous laugh.

An enigma, never meant to be fully understood – Lamy cements this as an avid storyteller of her own life – her past raises more questions than it answers, all part of her intangible allure. Sagacious priestess or mischievous innocent, she embodies it all, a pioneer of making ‘beauty’ your own long before the industry caught up. Who better to front the inaugural issue of System beauty and share her vision of the ever-complicated concept?

Thomas Lenthal: How many do you smoke a day, Michèle?

Michèle Lamy: Listen, there are no days because I smoke at night, too! I light lots of cigarettes, but I’ve done lots of tests, too. I already knew what the doctor would say and when he did the MRI, he said: ‘What am I looking for?’ It’s the same with drugs and alcohol; it’s all to do with your metabolism. There are people in their hundreds who smoke so many cigarettes.

Elizabeth von Guttman: Then you have people who have never smoked in their lives and they get cancer.

Thomas: So you think that if you haven’t had anything by, let’s say the age of 45, then it’s OK?

Michèle: There could come a time, if I felt run down or couldn’t box any more, but I only smoke a little, I don’t even inhale the smoke. I like lighting up the most. It’s because of Jean-Luc Godard that I smoke… Breathless.

Thomas: We all smoked because of the cinema.

Michèle: I didn’t think about it at the time, it was only afterwards that I realized.

Thomas: Did your parents smoke?

Michèle: Very little. No, they were drugged on other things. It was all completely legal.

Thomas: It was normal at the time. You could take Mogadon [a sleeping pill] and Captagon [a then-legal amphetamine] every day, no worries. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was fine. When did you start smoking?

Michèle: I started when I was 15 or 16. As soon as I stopped boarding. I was boarding near Annecy from 9 years old to 16.

Thomas: Did you have a uniform? Can you describe it?

Michèle: Like all uniforms really: a white shirt, little beret and all that. I liked boarding. The school was run by nuns, although we’re not at all Catholic in the family. My father was a Mason. Do you know the Jurassians? It’s all about free thinking, the Resistance. Not really very Catholic.

Thomas: How were the nuns dressed?

Michèle: Very nun-like, no cornettes, but they were dressed in black. Some of them were beautiful. They are incredible people.

Thomas: It’s not absurd to think there’s a connection between the nuns in your childhood and the fact you only dress in black now.

Elizabeth: Where were you born?

Michèle: Oyonnax. My mother and father families were from the Lyon region, restaurants and all that, and Jura, and they had a timber business. We were selling the last scraps of wood from the Jura, the woods that belonged to the family.

Thomas: Did you find yourself attractive when you were young? Who did you find attractive? Actors or actresses?

Michèle: Undoubtedly, there were actors, but I found lots of things beautiful; I love the mountains, the sea, people, and music. We were always travelling all over the place, so I found many things beautiful. I used to love it when they would put explosives in the mountains in Jura so the piste would be safe the next day. In fact, what I found the most beautiful was the desert. I was maybe 16 when I first went to North Africa, and saw Berber women in Tunisia. I was completely seduced by them. From then on I started searching for family there, not necessarily family, but something in the same region as family. At my boarding school, there was a real mix of people, there were fairer girls from German-speaking Switzerland and then I had friends who were olive-skinned. My grandmother powdered her skin, to fit in with norms, but it was funny how nobody sought their origins.

Thomas: For you, it was like finding your origins in Tunisia?

Michèle: I found it in the beauty, in the wrinkles, the language, which I never learned, but I’m still trying now.

Elizabeth: When did you start applying certain Berber motifs on yourself?

Michèle: I started that in Los Angeles. To begin I wore Guerlain kohl, then Saint Laurent. Whenever I was at an Italian train station, I would stock up on an inexpensive crayon you could get; I would buy 10 at a time.

Thomas: When did you start the tattoos?

Michèle: That was complicated because it was in Los Angeles and no one wanted to do the drawing for me because the tattooists were either men who wanted to do their own designs or they wouldn’t tattoo fingers. In the end, it was in North Palm Springs. You weren’t allowed to do tattoos in Palm Springs, so we went over to the other side where the bikers were and a guy did it for me. He was so happy to do something he had never done before because people only wanted little pigs and Betty Boop. I drew it on my finger and he went over it. Then for this one, it’s the same story, we were just below Aspen, but there wasn’t a tattooist there. I had to do something that wouldn’t be too complicated. Under the influence of Rick Owens, it became much cleaner! I would have liked him to do these petits croisillons all the way up to my fingertips, but it was impossible, too painful. So it stopped there where I could take it up to. The rest I dyed. I wanted to have the tips of my fingers black, and my feet as well. I dyed my feet with Bigen. It’s a Japanese brand; I’ll get a box to show you. I started because Rick Owens started getting white hair at 25.

Elizabeth: Oh, news flash!

Michèle: Breaking news! Yes, so I found this product at the end of the street, which was quite natural. It’s hair dye. I’ve been doing it for years. It stays on the nails like it does on the hair. It’s permanent, but I’ve just got back from Château La Coste, where I was in the swimming pool, and it fades. For the eyes, I would have had them tattooed, but it doesn’t stay black or as thick, it goes blue. It needs to be black, a dense black. To go with my blue eyes!

Elizabeth: What about your beauty rituals? What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

Michèle: A cigarette and a cup of tea. Then a hammam; I do it every day. I have one here in the house. I like how it’s foggy when you go in. I don’t really meditate that much. I think when I smoke, and it helps my sense of time as well. If I didn’t smoke during the day, I wouldn’t know what time it was!

Thomas: The food at your place is always very good and sophisticated. Did you always eat like that? Is it your Lyonnais side?

Michèle: It started when I arrived in Los Angeles. My grandfather, who died when I was very young, was a great chef. He had a restaurant in Lyon and at the airport, and he had a big house and farms. So food has always been important. There were lots of traditions in the family, where you couldn’t eat peas after July 14th, and things like that! I’m a bit like that, too.

Thomas: What about everything that’s olfactive, perfume, and so on? You seem to have a relationship with perfume that’s very personal. Don’t you mix your own perfumes?

Michèle: I don’t really like green scents; I like things that are quite strong, like Casablanca lilies, and I always say I like scents like hot sand and camel’s piss. Perfumes in that vein. A brand that I always liked and that still exists is Sables by Annick Goutal. But otherwise what I like best is buying patchouli, tuberose, roses, and mixing them. I put on a bit of this, a splash of that. It changes all the time. In the souk in Dubai, you find perfumes, and you mix them up. I like dark-coloured perfumes. I want to really smell them. People know when I’ve been somewhere, like at the gym, or they know when I’ve arrived because of my perfume. With my bracelets, too, which make a lot of noise. I don’t know why, but I like to announce my arrival! Like Tinkerbell, here I come.

Thomas: Is there a woman who you find beautiful today?

Michèle: There are lots. Louise Bourgeois. So many people I find beautiful. Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich. My mother had an air of Dietrich about her.

Thomas: You can’t disassociate the external beauty of the person from their internal quality?

Michèle: Now you say it, yes, I think that’s true.

Thomas: For you, it’s personality that’s beautiful. For men, too, but with a beautiful set of abs. Is it more visual for men?

Michèle: Yes, but there has to be something underneath that! It’s interesting, but it’s completely linked and the voice is very important. For example, [Gilles] Deleuze, he was very beautiful, with his twisted tones, because of the illness he had, but you could spend hours listening to his voice, and the voice and his eyes, and what he had to say. Now, that is seduction!

Thomas: So you’re more interested in seduction than contemplation?

Michèle: No, well, that’s what you say – that’s your quote!

Thomas: You’ll contemplate the desert, but not men.

Michèle: Yes. The end.