Lenny Kravitz
Editorial
The Idea
Creative concept and on-set art direction for the Mr Porter The Journal. Read an abstract from the article, below:
Mr Lenny Kravitz, 53 years old and somehow never a day over 30, looks up to two paragons of male agelessness, the idols of his future self. “One day, I was recording with Mick [Jagger] in my studio in Miami and we were in the kitchen on a ‘caviar break’ because, you know, Mick likes to have caviar and champagne for a break,” he laughs. “And Denzel [Washington] came over – he’s my big brother – and we realised that we were all born a decade apart. So there’s this little club that I have. It’s like, OK, I’ve just watched my boy Denzel go through this, 10 years ahead of me, and my other boy, Mick, is 20 years ahead of me.”
Mr Lenny Kravitz, 53 years old and somehow never a day over 30, looks up to two paragons of male agelessness, the idols of his future self. “One day, I was recording with Mick [Jagger] in my studio in Miami and we were in the kitchen on a ‘caviar break’ because, you know, Mick likes to have caviar and champagne for a break,” he laughs. “And Denzel [Washington] came over – he’s my big brother – and we realised that we were all born a decade apart. So there’s this little club that I have. It’s like, OK, I’ve just watched my boy Denzel go through this, 10 years ahead of me, and my other boy, Mick, is 20 years ahead of me.”
Next spring, Mr Kravitz will release his 11th studio album, followed directly by a 12th, which will keep him on tour until he is 58. But, as he points out, the lithe Sir Mick is still rocking at 74. “Mick can outperform a 20-year-old,” he says. “The Rolling Stones’ stages are huge. I’ve performed with them, and you don’t realise how much he is doing when you see him going back and forth and back and forth for two-and-a-half hours. So if you take care of yourself, [age] doesn’t matter. You can have two Porsches in the garage from 1964. One’s beaten up and one looks like it just came off the showroom floor.”
Indeed. Mr Kravitz is still in pristine condition. Apart from the length of his dreadlocks, he is almost physically unchanged from the 28-year-old clad in a feather boa and flares on the cover of his second album, 1991’s Mama Said: a mama’s boy with Bahamian and Jewish heritage and the falsetto of Mr Curtis Mayfield, dirty Mr Jimi Hendrix riffs and a folksy, late 1960s manifesto of peace, love and textural fabrics.
When he released his first album, Let Love Rule, in the electronic dance music-dominated late 1980s, he was written off as retrograde by some music critics who were perhaps stung that such a solo talent – he plays all the instruments on his records – also represented the resurrection of rock and raunch godliness of the previous decade.
Photography by Matthew Brookes
Styling by Dan May