Richardine Bartee
F
amed actor Idris Elba took time out of his busy schedule to talk to Essence, one of the world’s biggest publications for Black culture. During the interview, the cover story’s subject shared that his young child keeps him young, although he is 44-years-old.
“Because I’m 44 years old with a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, I’m rolling around playing and then I’m at a Drake concert with my teenage daughter. Having a young child now keeps me young, without a doubt…”
According to the press release I received this morning, some other things he discusses are his true passions, family, music, and Black women. As we all anticipate “The Dark Tower” and the new season of “Luther,” we can look at the audacious photo taken by Dennis Leupold for ESSENCE below.
Read more about the publication
ESSENCE is a monthly magazine for African American women between the ages of 18 and 49. It is the only magazine that focuses on reaching an audience of Black women, revolves around the Black woman experience, and has remained for a long period of time. The magazine covers fashion, lifestyle, and beauty, with an intimate girlfriend-to-girlfriend tone, and its slogan “Fierce, Fun, and Fabulous” suggests the magazine’s goal of empowering African-American women. The topics the magazine discusses range from celebrities to fashion, to point-of-view pieces addressing current issues in the African-American community. A number of its readers engage closely and personally with the publication, and it claims to be the magazine “for and about Black women.”
Edward Lewis, Clarence O. Smith, Cecil Hollingsworth and Jonathan Blount founded ESSENCE Communications Inc. (ECI) in 1968, and it began publishing ESSENCE magazine in May 1970. Lewis and Smith called the publication a “lifestyle magazine directed at upscale African American women.” They recognized that Black women were an overlooked demographic and saw ESSENCE as an opportunity to capitalize on a virtually untouched market of Black women readers. Its initial circulation was approximately 50,000 copies per month, subsequently growing to roughly 1.6 million. Gordon Parks served as its editorial director during the first three years of its circulation.
