Hair: Issac Poleon at CLM using L’ORÉAL PROFESSIONNEL. Make-up: Mata Marielle at CLM using CLARINS. Set design: Patience Harding at New School. Photographic assistants: Andy Broadhurst, Dominic Markes and Abena Appiah. Styling assistants: Bella Kavanagh, Douglas Miller and Mary Hovhannisyan. Set-design assistants: Charlotte Cook and King Owusu. Production: TIAGI. Executive producer: Chantelle-Shakila Tiagi. Producer: Martha Barr. Production runner: Tamara Ohene. Post-production: Ink
In June 2020 Steve Lacy’s life changed. He was driving through a canyon in the mountains near his home in Los Angeles, California, on a road that had space for just one vehicle, when a car hit him head-on.
“I remember a black flash,” he recalls. “I thought I’d died. It scared the shit out of me.” After several moments he opened his eyes and looked down at his body to check he was OK. “Still in this bitch,” he remembers thinking with relief. He quickly got out of his car, worrying that it might explode, and escaped, miraculously unscathed but for a few cuts on his hands.
This event had a profound impact on Lacy, who is sitting across from me in a restaurant in east London, dressed in all-black Balenciaga. He shares the story only after I ask him what motivates him, what gets him out of bed in the morning. After pausing for a good 30 seconds he responds simply with one word: “Death.”
“Death,” he repeats. He has already mentioned, early on, that he has a “sarcastic, satirical” sense of humour, so it’s hard to tell if he’s joking or not. That seems to be true – but here he’s sombre, reflective. “The realisation that death defines the meaning of your life,” he continues. “I feel like that near-death experience shifted everything in a way. I felt lighter afterwards. It made me look at my life. Like, what matters? What am I going to put my energy into?” He tails off.
An encounter with death does things to the human psyche –
