Harry Styles: The making of a modern man

A man wrought in the fires of teenage boyband hyper-stardom is not afraid of a little commotion.

Still when Harry Styles — the One Direction matinée idol turned languid Gen Z icon — tweeted, at 1.01pm GMT on Wednesday afternoon, that he would be taking his upcoming album Fine Line on tour, you could, if attuned to the correct demographic frequency, hear the howl echo around the internet: guttural, hungry, ululating. This was a pseudo-religious experience: one viral meme depicted the Pope holding a copy of his album aloft. The announcement has been retweeted almost 70,000 times.

The 25-year old is a tour veteran — he spent five years and five albums strapped to the thundering 1D juggernaut — but this new tour is his first as a bona fide solo brand. The album, his first in two years, is synth-soaked and soulful, the album’s aesthetic fever-dreamy.

Granted, he’s not the first person to go to SoCal, try a few magic mushrooms and declare himself radically transformed, but the results are beguiling — and certainly a world away from his years as a Simon Cowell Ken doll.

Since his last record, he has co-hosted the Met Gala and been reborn as an Alessandro Michele muse. This is your Styles crib sheet.

Melody maker

Styles’s new album — written under a tie-dye mist after taking the aforementioned psychedelics, which also resulted in a mishap in which he bit off the tip of his tongue — is “all about having sex and feeling sad”, which, granted, as a topline, does not wildly differentiate the record from the genre of “all other music ever”. Still, the early signs for Fine Line are encouraging. Its first single, Lights Up — which has been streamed almost 100 million times on Spotify — is synth-y, soulful, understatedly anthemic, very different to, and better than, the lead single on his last solo record, the Seventies, soft-rock Sign of the Times (it still, of course, hit No 1), and very, very different from anything he did with 1D.

Many thousands of words have been written about whether there is a bisexual subtext to Lights Up. It has been noted that the song was released on National Coming Out Day, that Styles’s sexuality has been subject to frenzied speculation before, the video features an oiled-up, topless Styles gyrating around men and women, and that the lyrics (“Shine, I’m not ever going back/Shine, step into the light”) could be interpreted as a meaningful revelation of sorts. Certainly, he has become a queer icon — especially with Gen Z — who are thrilled by his selection of genderqueer singer-songwriter King Princess as his support act for the European part of his tour.

Speaking of collaborators, Styles worked on the album with producers Tyler Johnson, who has worked with Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Ed Sheeran, and Jeff Bhasker, who has collaborated with Mark Ronson and Kanye West, and his friend, Tom Hull, aka Kid Harpoon, who co-wrote Shake It Out for Florence + The Machine.

He has also been granted a fairy godmother: Stevie Nicks, who called him her “little muse” at Fleetwood Mac’s hyped Wembley headline gig in June. “She’s always there for you,” Styles has said in the past. “She knows what you need: advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl.” Sure.

Got Styles

Any young man raised in the white heat of a boyband spotlight must be granted the space to find his fashion path; Styles has done so with no missteps and exuberant pleasure. Once upon a time, he would semaphore his individuality with a bandana; now, he turns up to a cover interview with Rolling Stone in a white floppy hat, blue denim bell-bottoms and Gucci shades, his nails coloured pink and green. His favourite trousers, until he lost them on the beach, were a pair of mustard corduroy flares; this week, he wore a Lanvin sweater vest with a sheep design that sent a coterie of London menswear stylists into throes of ecstasy.

He wears floral suits and Cuban heels, ruffled, New Romantic shirts, Charles Jeffrey jumpsuits and pussy-bow blouses. It is flamboyant, self-consciously Bowie/Jagger, and in Gen Z parlance, “very extra”. His stylist Harry Lambert is partial to an extravagant collar, dramatic neckline and a voluminous trouser.

Besides Lambert, another part of this evolution has been his relationship with Gucci’s creative director Michele, who has turned the Italian heritage brand into the ultimate post-gender luxury fashion label, the first to merge their menswear and womenswear, and dispatch male models down the catwalk in dresses and women in suits. A good look for a Gen Z idol.

With the brand

Notably, the branding on this album and its tour artwork is consistent with this new look Styles. The album cover features Styles in white custom-made Gucci bell bottoms and a Pepto-Bismol-pink shirt, open almost to the waist, shot by mod-goth Tim Walker with a fisheye lens (it is Walker’s hand in that S&M glove you can see in the left-hand corner). In the dreamy video for Lights Up he wears a glittery suit and suspenders, in a sort of hallucinatory version of Saturday Night Fever. Into it.

Stand up

Then there’s his voice — not the music, but the activism. Even as one-fifth of a boyband manufactured by Cowell’s algorithm, he was quick, quippy and itching to go off-message; but now that he controls his own, he is amplifying causes such as Black Lives Matter and End Gun Violence. He wore stickers for both on his guitar on his last tour, which might sound small, except that photographs of Styles gallop around the digital world at hyperspeed. At concerts, he has waved pride, bi and trans flags, and a Black Lives Matter flag. He once borrowed a flag from an audience member at a show in Philadelphia that read, “Make America Gay Again”. At a show on his last tour, he declared: “If you are black, if you are white, if you are gay, if you are straight, if you are transgender — whoever you are, whoever you want to be, I support you.”

A vocal, engaged fandom of teenage girls minted his multimillion-pound fortune; he is loyal and admiring of their zeal. “They’re the most honest — especially if you’re talking about teenage girls, but older as well,” he told Rolling Stone this summer. “They have that bulls*** detector. We’re so past that dumb outdated narrative of ‘Oh, these people are girls, so they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ They’re the ones who know what they’re talking about. They’re the people who listen obsessively. They f***ing own this s***. They’re running it.” Obviously, he’s a feminist. “Of course men and women should be equal. I don’t want credit for being a feminist. I think the ideals of feminism are pretty straightforward.” An icon is born.