It’s officially fall. How do I know this? Well, it’s time for the meme of Lenny Kravitz in an enormous, blanket-sized scarf to re-emerge. But this time, it popped back up with a twist: The actor and musician played along with the scarf meme in his debut TikTok, which was uploaded over the weekend.
“Grab your big scarf, it’s the first day of fall,” Kravtiz says, walking towards the camera, wearing the infamous scarf.
This moment was a decade in the making. On a fateful day in Nov. 2012, a paparazzi photographer captured an image of Kravitz on his way to get groceries while he wore a scarf of ginormous proportions. The scarf is mesmerizing. It’s a Kravitz cocoon, if you will.
Redditors, of course, immediately loved the image, and in the following years began photoshopping the scarf to make it even bigger. Some Redditors even cosplayed as Kravtiz in his fall attire, or knitted identical looking scarves.
More than five years later, Jimmy Fallon asked Kravitz about the scarf, on an episode of The Tonight Show. It once again catapulted the meme into the limelight. “I cannot escape this, brother,” Kravitz said to Fallon. “I live in the Bahamas, I’m used to hot weather, and — you see I had to go to the store. I was buying some groceries, right? And I thought I’d put on a little scarf to protect my throat, and that’s the scarf I had.”
“But Lenny, this is not a scarf. This is a blanket,” Fallon responds (correctly.) Kravitz then goes on to verify that that image is, indeed, the scarf, but that “the scarf keeps getting bigger and bigger” thanks to people on the internet.
Another five years later, and the scarf is back on our timelines — this time, thanks to Kravtiz himself. Happy fall.