How Pierce Brosnan, Lenny Kravitz, YG and More Found Their Highly Advanced Personal Style

Lenny Kravitz

The Barometer for Modern-Day Rock-Star Style

Lenny Kravitz seems to effortlessly embody the term “rock star,” even when he's sitting in on a design meeting for his furniture collection or scoring a baguette on a Paris side street. “I grew up in the ’70s in New York, at a time when my mother and father [Roxie Roker of The Jeffersons fame and TV producer Sy Kravitz] were around a lot of artists, musicians, and writers. People like Miles Davis. His closet was filled with just the most fantastic leathers and suedes and silks. And glasses and scarves. And animal prints. The whole thing was very funky.” His sure-footed style has always been grounded in that '70s spirit of freedom and self-expression, even when he's in a transitional period. “Sometimes there's a little section where you're just trying to figure it out. And after a while you go, ‘Ugh. Not me.’ But that's part of changing. I like change.” In fact, looking back on the many evolutionary phases of Lenny Kravitz—from crushed-velvet top hat to biker leather to blanket-sized scarf; from resplendent locks to relaxed perm and back—the only relevant question may be: Where is his head at today? “Right now I'm at my studio in the Bahamas. There's no dry cleaner here, so whatever I'm wearing has to be something I can run a hose over or put in a bucket of water and dry out on a rock.” — Edwin “Stats” Houghton

Danny Bowien

The Renegade Chef with Experimental Taste

When Danny Bowien emerged from high school, he was listless and mourning the death of his mother. But playing in an emo band changed everything. “I started wearing whatever I wanted,” he says. After a few years with the band, Bowien took off to San Francisco for culinary school, where he adopted the greasy uniform of a hard-partying line cook. But he also made friends in fashion, and by the time the first iteration of Mission Chinese Food opened, in San Francisco in 2010, he started indulging his budding interest in designer clothing. As critics tried to find the words to classify a Korean-American chef making explosive Chinese food that wasn't really Chinese food at all, Danny moved to N.Y.C. to open a Mission Chinese on the Lower East Side. While New York's creative class gathered at his place for Thrice Cooked Bacon and Chongqing Chicken Wings, Bowien's personal style grew more advanced. His knack for breaking with culinary convention attracted him especially to the work of Vetements and Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia, whose subversive collections defy easy classification. “When Vetements launched, people didn't know what to make of it,” Bowien says. “When I came onto the scene, people didn't know what to think of me. They were like, ‘Is this a joke? Is this guy going to be around for a long time?’ ” A new Mission Chinese Food opens this summer in Brooklyn, so for now the answer is yes. — Samuel Hine

YG

The Second Coming of South Central Swagger

“Mannequins.” That's how YG sees the fashion choices of his hip-hop peers: “They all look the same. I'm an original dude. I'm not a follower. Whatever the majority of people is doing is what I don't wanna do.” The 28-year-old rapper is wholly a product of his hometown: Compton, California. “What influences what I wear is where I'm from,” he says. Distinct regional styles, like the one YG maintains, are rare these days. Style has been homogenized by the global Internet, especially in hip-hop, where not so long ago you'd be able to identify rappers from Harlem, Houston, Atlanta, and L.A. by how they sound and look. Now those unique stylistic dialects are borrowed and re-interpreted around the world. But YG's sound is undoubtedly (and how else are you gonna say it?) straight outta Compton, and he has the look to match. Sharing geographic and cultural DNA with Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and the rest of N.W.A helped shape his self-image. He continues to build on that foundation today, finding new ways to tweak the classic South Central gangbangers' uniform of high-water Dickies, white over-the-calf socks, and Chuck Taylors. Currently in rotation: “White socks, hard bottoms, and a red bandanna,” he says. The one thing you're guaranteed to see on YG: his ankles. Whether he's going above the knee with cutoff jorts or mid-calf in a pair of extra-no-break trousers, the pants are always cropped. — Noah Johnson

Pierce Brosnan

James Bond of the Wild West

Dress Pierce Brosnan like a Texan (like the kind he plays on AMC's The Son) and it becomes clear in an instant that the man can imbue any genre of wardrobe with his innate Pierce Brosnan-ness: the eyes, the stateliness, the impossible self-assuredness. It's unfair, really. So it isn't surprising that he could pull off this quintessentially American look. He's kept his eyes due west his whole life. “I've always enjoyed the history of America,” he says. “The culture of America. And especially growing up in Ireland, the Western was a very strong format. So it was somewhat in my subconscious, the cowboys and the Indians of life.” We all know that Brosnan didn't just play Bond all those years. He was Bond. At least in our collective consciousness. And so with his new role as Texas rancher Eli McCullough, he's made a personal-style pivot to match the personality. He grew in a mane of dignified facial hair and, on occasion, dons a cowboy hat. “I melded the Irishness of my own character with the soul of this character,” Brosnan says. “The Texas life has been good to me, and I have a great affinity with it now, this lovely landscape of culture. It's very unique, and it's been a very powerful experience.” Spoiler: The beard won't last. Brosnan's wife, journalist Keely Shaye Smith, has tolerated it long enough. “She wants her Irish boy Pierce back again,” he says. “Not some old goat.” — Drew Magary

Lil Uzi Vert

The Charismatic Frontman for the Emo-Rap Movement

“I just got this jacket,” Lil Uzi Vert says, unprompted, as he exits a venue he just finished headlining in Irving, Texas. In fact, everything Uzi's wearing he just got, including the Burberry shirt and scarf, which he's tied around his head. The Philadelphia native travels everywhere with his three closest childhood friends, who double as his shopping companions. According to them, he spends “house money” every time he goes to check out. The 23-year-old rapper rejected his high school's uniform and found his voice with fashion even before he launched a SoundCloud page. And now that he's made it, Uzi is flamboyant and self-possessed, with a knack for flourish that's reminiscent of rock stars like Axl Rose, Prince, and even Marilyn Manson (Uzi sometimes wears a $220K diamond pendant of Manson's bust). There is nothing even remotely ordinary or predictable about what Uzi wears—one day it's all Von Dutch, the next he's wearing avant-garde European designer Craig Green. He wore goth-raver bondage pants with a black Balenciaga hoodie to the Grammy Awards. “I always had a vision for my style,” Uzi says. “But before, I didn't really get it. Even when I got money, my style wasn't all the way there yet. But with traveling the world and seeing different stuff, I get it now.” How does Uzi sum up his unorthodox style? “Dressed in the dark.” — S.H.

Barry Keoghan

The Enigmatic New Face of Young Hollywood

Barry Keoghan explains in his profanity-laden Irish lilt that the most important things for him—when it comes to clothes—are how they feel on his body and how they make him feel to the world. Naturally, then, he can most often be found trolling around his hometown of Dublin in a tracksuit. Hollywood, too. It makes a defiant sort of sense for the young actor whose life is powering up to hyperspeed. Last year he had a career-jump-starting role in Dunkirk and starred in Yorgos Lanthimos's The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In an anarchic time in the fashion world, why not wear exactly what you want? “What I wear is what I wore growing up with. I don't change it,” he says. “I'm a tracksuit guy. Confident and comfy. I'd go around naked if I wanted. No clothes. Confident, mate. You can judge, but I'm walking around Hollywood, representin' the real.” It's completely understandable that he wants the troublemaker air a tracksuit gives off. Oh, and there's another thing he wears to remind him of where he came from: a wooden devotional bracelet with images of saints on it that his gran gave him when he was a child, after he lost his mother to heroin. Keoghan wears the bracelet every day, even keeping it on, say, when he's about to do a bit of ring work at his local boxing club. Which brings up another key to the Keoghan aesthetic: Borrow directly from “the guys who get out of bed in the morning and walk around with bedhead. The guys who don't give a fuck.” — Benjy Hansen-Bundy

Patrick Grant

The New-School Tailor Shaking Up Savile Row

On paper, Patrick Grant’s wardrobe is perfectly traditional: He sticks to a uniform of 20-plus-year-old brogues, gray cuffed trousers, a hopsack blazer, and a thick, tweedy overcoat. After all, the designer runs a miniature tailoring empire whose labels, E. Tautz and Norton & Sons, have been making clothing on Savile Row for more than 300 years combined. But in practice, Grant’s style is on the cutting edge of contemporary fashion. “I got really bored of the very fitted silhouette in menswear,” says Grant. “It just felt a bit old and tired, and it felt very normal. So I only really wear a very straight-cut jacket with quite a draped fit.” It’s at E. Tautz where he has developed his signature oversize take on British tailoring: soft, boxy jackets; enormous deeply pleated trousers; and long, drapey outerwear. And while Grant’s roomy suits might have shocked a few years ago, the rest of fashion has since caught up. “That’s the nice thing about menswear—you don’t have to make huge, flamboyant statements with your clothes,” says Grant. “You just have to shift things subtly to ensure that you feel like you’re on the right side of modernity.” — S.H.