WHEN LENNY MET DOM
A collaboration between Dom Pérignon and Lenny Kravitz sets up the mother of all parties. Sean Fitzpatrick travels to France to talk to the legendary rock star, raise his vibrations and get the selfie to prove it
Iam at the old abbey in Hautvillers, France, where champagne was created by Dom Pierre Pérignon late in the 17th century. Some 300 years later and the brand that bears his name has become one of the world’s top champagne houses, with marketing budgets to match. I have been flown here to interview Dom Pérignon’s latest collaborator, the legendary, Grammy-award-winning purveyor of the super-fly, Lenny Kravitz. We are in a stone chalet ensconced in a small wood a short distance from the abbey. It’s one of those defining moments in the annals of Cool Things I Have Done. Of course, in this picture-or-it-didn’thappen age, I must ask for the obligatory selfie. He happily agrees and, as I get up to move closer to him, he says smoothly, “No, stay there. I’ll come over to you.” He leans over my back and drapes his left arm on my shoulder, the same heavily tattooed left arm that is responsible for some of the most earth-shuddering guitar riffs in rock history. Just as I take the shot, he forms his hand into a fist of brotherhood, and I’m pretty sure that means we’re now bros. I’m feeling very awesome and a little destabilised by this rock god’s common courtesy.
For someone who spends most of his time in public on stage with his wild hair flailing as he blasts another power chord to thousands upon thousands of screaming fans, Kravitz is surprisingly sedate in person, his voice soothing in contrast to the gutsy vocals that characterise his biggest hits. He is considerate and interested in others. In fact, he’d make a consummate party host. Any initial eyebrow-raising caused by the Kravitz-pérignon collaboration quickly gives way to respect for the whizz who came up with this inspired pairing. Previous Dom collaborations were curious, cerebral exercises in design, viz. Marc Newson’s bulbous, lime-green objet and David Lynch’s explorations of white-hot metallurgy. Kravitz’s name brings a lush soulfulness to the series, something that seems natural for a champagne house that, more than any other, epitomises the good times.
His role as the house’s creative director will last three years. This month sees the unveiling of the first phase of the partnership, a campaign based on a series of images conceived and photographed by Kravitz himself. While Kravitz has previously released a book of photographs, this is the first time his images have been used by a brand. For the campaign, he wanted to capture moments from a perfect party and, rather than stage a fake gathering in a studio with models, Kravitz handpicked a coterie of fellow celebrities and invited them, along with dozens of party extras, to an actual shindig he hosted at the Stanley House, a jaw-dropping US$38 million property in the Hollywood Hills. The neo-modern mansion, which boasts sweeping vistas of Los Angeles, was designed by Kravitz’s own studio, Kravitz Design. Staging the mother of all parties there seemed like a fitting way to mark the property’s sale to an ultra-wealthy couple.
“The night of the shoot was actually the last night we were able to be in the house as the next morning the new owners were taking it over. So we had the last supper and the last hurrah. We just destroyed the place,” he says with a coy smile. “Nah, we left it nicely for them. But if the owners had seen the hundred and something people we had in the house and just the shit everywhere… It was quite something.”
His celebrity friends came from the worlds of fashion, film, dance and sport. Kravitz created the right aesthetic chemistry by bringing together people of different ages, hence Hollywood heavyweights Harvey Keitel and Susan Sarandon appear alongside fashion designer Alexander Wang, model/actress Abbey Lee, dancer Benjamin Millepied and football icon Hidetoshi Nakata. The most striking member of the cast is Kravitz’s daughter, Zoë, a star in her own right. Although he is clearly a doting father, he didn’t initially include her. “Actually, I didn’t pick my daughter. That would have seemed a little pushy,” he says, before adding that it was Dom Pérignon’s
communications team who suggested she take part. The result is a photo-reportage of the Coolest Party Ever, shot in a black-and-white, hard-flash style reminiscent of the work of Ron Galella, the legendary but controversial 1970s paparazzo famous for his candid shots of celebrities partying at Studio 54.
The photographs are fomo-inducing: Sarandon is caught smiling, tossing her head back as if in the aftermath of some brilliant anecdote; Lee is sexily strumming a guitar; Keitel looms Svengali-esque as Wang and Millepied frolic about. Kravitz says he wanted to capture the celebration of friendship, of people enjoying the moment:
“Champagne has this thing around it: you only drink it for this occasion, or a wedding or birthday. But it’s also something that can be enjoyed just because life is here. Life is here today. The photographs show the connection between people.”
Most mesmerising of all the images is an intimate shot of Zoë getting ready for the party. Kravitz is behind, shooting into the mirror with a camera over his face. The image could have been taken 30 years earlier, when a nascent Kravitz was married to Zoë’s mother, actress Lisa Bonet, of whom Zoë is, well, a mirror image. Kravitz, who is still single and “looking for the right partner,” says he will hang this one in his home.
It’s time for lunch and we dine at the abbey’s stone refectory where, 300 years ago, Dom Pierre Pérignon ate meals with his fellow Benedictine monks. Our meal today is somewhat more lavish. We are joined by the house’s chef de cave, Richard Geoffroy, a rock star of the champagne world. Geoffroy is
part winemaker, part Jean-paul Sartre, and can take you on a philosophical, stream-of-conscious journey into time, climates, terroirs, emotions, conflicts, tensions, expressions and back again in the same meandering sentence. As he talks, his hands pull apart an imaginary object to illustrate his favoured process of stretching and reconstituting flavours, ideas, things, whatever. The scion of a long line of winemakers, Geoffroy originally studied medicine before joining the famed house and developing new approaches to winemaking. One such novelty is the brilliantly marketable (and expensive) P2 and P3 series, which resulted from Geoffroy’s observation that champagne undergoes a second and third plénitude, or state of fullness, when kept in the bottle with yeast for longer periods. He is the subject of a coming documentary and throughout the day he is trailed by a film crew which at one point briefly interviews me about him.
As we enjoy a pairing meal, Geoffroy describes how he and Kravitz met some 10 years earlier and instantly developed a friendship and mutual appreciation. At several moments during the meal, Geoffroy and Kravitz clasp hands in bromantic fashion. They are clearly still close friends. Geoffroy says he was keen to solidify their friendship with a tangible project and hence the collaboration. It did not matter that it took 10 years, he says, only that it happened when the time was right. The winemaker’s lyrical flow takes us to obtuse musings on “nodes” and “connections,” of states where quality is the result of eclectic permutations of varietal expressions. I see why the men are friends; the process Geoffroy describes could apply to Kravitz’s own genre-defying journey through music, where, in his 30-year career, the multi-instrumentalist has mastered a plethora of styles, from folk to rock, from soul to EDM, with impressive dexterity. Kravitz has also expanded his career beyond music; in addition to interior design, he has taken on acting roles, such as that of Cinna, the fashion designer in the Hunger Games movie franchise.
I notice that aside from a couple of bread rolls, Kravitz has not touched the fancy food before us. I take it to be a health decision. Kravitz, who looks no older than 30, is the only 54-year-old rock star in the world with abs that warrant the unbuttoning of shirts to the navel. Trying not to sound too desperate, I ask for his secret. “I exercise. It’s not the most fun thing but it has the benefits. I watched my grandfather
do it his whole life. He’s in his 90s and could kick my ass. He was incredible, in the best shape, working out, riding bikes, running, hiking, working in the yard. Keeping his body and his mind young. So it rubbed off.”
Our conversation drifts naturally into fashion, Slimaneera Saint Laurent, and how he’s done with skinny jeans and is now “all about flares.” Since bursting onto the scene in 1989, Kravitz has epitomised the bohemian superstud. Scroll through his Instagram and you’ll see an intoxicating stream of leather, fringes, beads, those flares, snakeskin boots and his famous dreadlocks. His obsession with retro fashion is beyond superficiality, however. Rather, it seems to stem from an affinity with the Summer of Love and its zeitgeist of peaceful dissent.
“I particularly gravitate towards the late ’60s and early ’70s, just because that’s when I grew up and what I know first-hand. The fashion and the glamour had a lot of flair, extravagance. It felt new and modern to what had been before. The ’60s and ’70s were vibrant and there was a lot of change going on and people were standing up for their beliefs and really pushing the boundaries for the betterment of mankind in general. And really standing up against wars and inequality. Of course, that goes on during all times, but it was really powerful then. I think we got a little quiet with that and right now we’re coming back,” he says, hinting at a current climate in which mass shootings, police brutality and ecological decline dominate the headlines.
His 11th album, Raise Vibration, which is released this month, sees Kravitz deliver a social commentary and a call to action that was far less pronounced in his earlier work. The second single from the album, an eight-minute funk-infused polemic entitled It’s Enough, is accompanied by a video cut from scenes of environmental degradation and civil unrest so shocking it comes with a Youtube warning. The final seconds feature a drone shot over Hong Kong during 2014’s Occupy Central.
“I love life. I want to vibrate at the maximum vibration that I can. I want to represent love, and that, for me, is everything. That’s what I learned from my family growing up. And that’s why the album and the tour is called Raise Vibration, because I believe collectively, as a planet, we must vibrate at a higher consciousness in order to understand the simple fact that we are all one people. We are all created by the same creator, and we live on one Earth and all of these invisible, imaginary borders, they don’t really mean anything because we are all affected by what we do anywhere on the planet. So when we begin to destroy and hate and do things that we do in one place, it’s going to affect everywhere eventually. And so I’m hoping for a rise in vibration and consciousness and that we would somehow begin to understand that unity is our only way out of this.”
And that’s worth raising our glasses to.