From ‘X Factor’ Onesies To The Row, Revisit 33 Of Harry Styles’s Best Looks To Date
“Erm,” said Harry Styles when he made his television debut in 2010. “I work in a bakery? And I, like, serve cakes in the shop bit…” Then 16, the erstwhile One Directioner was dressed in a long-line cardigan and a scoop-neck tee with a thin scarf – printed with what looked like hieroglyphs – looped around his neck. A fabric bracelet, or “manacle”, was rolled up the length of his forearm. This, in the early 2010s, was considered a real expression of someone’s fashion capital, particularly if that person’s Avenue Montaigne happened to be a Topman in Redditch. But less than a decade – and a string of record-breaking world tours, albums, brand launches, high-profile romances and Beatlemania levels of adulation – later, pop culture would elect Styles its menswear god.
Much of this was down to the fact that Styles – in the tradition of a great number of performers before him – wore pearl necklaces and pussy-bow blouses, high-waisted trousers and a woefully-underreported saloon dress on the November 2020 issue of Vogue. Even if the musician’s personal wardrobe rarely went beyond a cropped tee and jeans, his on-stage persona – masterminded by the stylist Harry Lambert and Gucci’s former creative director Alessandro Michele – was one of flamboyance: a taut, tattooed bod swathed in lime-green feather boas, sequined flares and fuchsia jumpsuits. A swaggering sex symbol rooted not in sleaze but silliness.
Now 31, Styles is a brand founder and angel investor in the British label SS Daley, and his influence can be traced across the current crop of heartthrobs – Timothée Chalamet, Kit Connor, Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi among them – who seem to have built their own image atop Styles’s glittering blueprint. Evidence, too, can be found closer to home: in the sheer number of heterosexual muggles now emboldened to wear pearl necklaces – and the odd swipe of nail polish if they also happen to be amateur poets – on a night out. The only truly unforgivable legacy, in my view, is the mainstreaming of the single dangly earring. It just about worked at a Met Gala themed around the word “camp”… less so on my friend’s boyfriend, who has recently made the courageous decision to experiment with songwriting.