#the vibes of this novel and what open label has released are very VERY different s

[sanvees]

ย้อนวาสนารัก | reverse the fortunes of love

"ถ้าเราได้รักกันทุกชาติไปก็คงจะดีไม่น้อยเลย"

- "if we could love each other in every lifetime, it would be quite good."

"ไม่ต้องห่วงพี่จะทำให้เราได้รักกันทุกชาติ... ไม่ว่าชาตินี้หรือชาติหน้า...."

- "don't worry, i'll make sure we love each other in every lifetime... whether it's this life or the next..."

so, century of love is rumored to be based on the novel reverse the fortunes of love by pantanakan on tunwalai. this hasn't been confirmed but thai twitter is convinced so inter twitter is convinced lol

with no proper english translation available, i bring you my very poor attempt at a little break down of the novel.

✨ BIG SPOILERS. BIG BIG SPOILERS. ✨

also please note ‼️ trigger warning ‼️ : underage/age gap* (i'll explain more under the cut)

before diving in, i want to talk about the trigger warning. when i started combing through the novel, it wasn't mentioned ANYWHERE in the text itself that one of the characters is under age. it wasn't until i was doing one last check through on the story page that i noticed the character profiles which is the only place the age of this character is mentioned. since it's not mentioned in the novel itself you can ignore it or not...

✨ characters ✨

pansaeng 'pan' tontrakarn

- name meanings: a thousand lights (as bright as the sun)

- 22 years old ; 4th year history major

- good at sports, especially muay thai. he's weak at love and always feels like he's waiting for someone he'll love at first sight

⭐ pan is the present day version of khun suriyen (meaning sun), a civil servant of the royal thai chamberlain regiment (i'm not 100% on this translation but i tried) who was assassinated at the age of 20.

phopduean 'duean' wattanaroj

-name meanings: world of the moon (month; reincarnation)

- 19 years old ; 1st year english major

- there isn't much characterization for him 😐 but overall he seems to have a calm and cool personality. especially doesn't like pan.

⭐ duean is the present day version of bulan (meaning moon), a merchant's son that is polite, kind, and beautiful. at fifteen (15), he is traded into suriyen's family to pay off debts.

one day, while running late for the first day of the new term, pansaeng bumps into duean on the train platform. when pan hands a paper back to duean, their hands brush and his ears ring and a voice speaks in his head:

"if there is a next life, may the person who is hurt be phi. may phi be the one who loves me while i never have feelings for you at all!"

for pan, this was love at first and so he attempts to flirt with duean any chance he gets, but he's constantly rejected.

"i want to please the one i like."

"but i don't like you."

ultimately, on a day pan is once again rejected, he walks around campus and he's struck by a potted plant falling from above him. this knocks him out.

300 years in the past, bulan, the only son of a merchant, and his father, are traveling to the capital when they decide to stop for a rest. bulan is attacked by some jerks but is saved by a young man with whom he falls in love with at first sight. when bulan and his dad reach their destination, bulan is surprised to find out it's the family home of the young man who saved him: khun suriyen.

even more surprising is that bulan's father intends to trade him in repayment to a debt he owes to suriyen's family. meanwhile, suriyen's mom decides that her son and bulan will have an arranged marriage, which suriyen immediately hates.

suriyen treats bulan harshly every day, always going out of his way to make bulan cry. he constantly tells bulan he hates him, and even after they are married, refuses to share a room with him which hurts bulan feelings even more.

"in this life, i have the good fortune of being with you, but i have no luck in love. because i am as low as mud, it would not be appropriate for me to love you."

as for suriyen, he is working secretly to stop rebels aiding the burmese and one night he leaves with a list of names. as he sets off into the forest, he is attacked by khlai, his former friend and a member of the guard, before he can deliver the list. while he lays beaten and dying, he thinks of bulan. he's actually been in love with him from the beginning but resented the arranged marriage and doesn't like that bulan's dad basically sold off his only son to repay a debt. suriyen feels guilty for everything he did to bulan and with his last few moments alive, he makes a wish.

"i wish i could come back and tell my love to bulan, to change everything that happened."

in the present-ish time, after being knocked out by the plant, pansaeng wakes up and finds himself 300 years in the past with a boy who resembles duean calling himself bulan while pan himself resembles suriyen. even suriyen's mom looks like pan's deceased mom.

pan and bulan grow close, since bulan reminds him of duean just without the constant rejection. one day they go pick lotus together and pan kisses bulan. they also both end up soaking wet after falling into the lake. there's almost an undressing moment when they return to the house but pansaeng is called to meet with phraya san, one of suriyen's colleagues, who asks about the list of names.

pansaeng's history knowledge has helped him navigate suriyen's day to day life thus far but when he's forced to recall suriyen's final moments, he develops a headache and passes out. after he's recovered, he pokes around suriyen's room and finds his diary. inside, he reads about suriyen's life, the tensions with the burmese, and the rebels. he also discovers that suriyen did really love bulan. he hides the diary when bulan comes in and goes with him to the market.

as they shop around, bulan is bullied by narong, the son of phra phontep and his servants. pan steps --revealing that "suriyen" is alive-- and he uses his muy thai skills to kick the servants' butts. narong flees and tells his dad suriyen is alive as we find out it was phonthep that order for suriyen to be assassinated.

the next day, phra phontep and narong show up at casa de suriyen so phra phontep can see for himself that suriyen is alive as well as to gauge what he remembers. pan, because he read suriyen's diary, knows the two are suspected rebels and plays up his head injury and memory loss -- but not without being a little shit about it (pan has a foul mouth lol).

when the dirty duo goes to leave, narong attempts to bother bulan again but pan ofc steps in. narong leaves angry and afterwards, pansaeng tells bulan he loves him. (yes... that fast lol)

"from now on, let's start over... whatever i did that made bulan sad, i'm sorry. forgive me."

bulan accepts this and also confesses his feelings to "suriyen". the two kiss and embrace and crazy ass fucking pansaeng decides that they will consummate their wedding that night.🫠 end of chapter ten.

chap 11 is an NC chap (i saved up my keys on tunwalai to unlock this 🫠) so... true to his word, pansaeng sleeps with bulan. the next morning, suriyen's mom returns from a trip (she left?????) and notices how happy her son and bulan look. she talks with bulan, discussing the change of heart suriyen had. bulan worries that suriyen will regain his old memories and hate him again. later bulan shares these fears with pansaeng and he assures bulan that will never happen.

"don't worry, even though there are some things i don't remember, the feelings i have for bulan i will always remember [...] i love you so much."

pansaeng says this partly as himself, and partly for suriyen since he'd read his diary and knew his feelings for bulan.

"no matter what life you're in, i'll remember you."

the next chapter begins in a hut far from the city where khlai and phonthep are having a secret meeting. narong, who is there as well, tells khlai that suriyen is still alive and to go see for himself. we learn khlai had accepted the assassination job against suriyen because he was removed from the guard and was jealous of suriyen.

khlai finds "suriyen" at the market, meeting with colleagues and discussing the list of rebel names in a tavern. khlai is shocked and when he goes to leave, he knocks bulan over. the commotion draws pansaeng's attention and he comes over. khlai freaks, having a vision of a bloody suriyen left to die, and draws his knife. "suriyen" steps between him and bulan, getting slashed in the arm for his effort. khlai runs away and ends up dropping something that jun, bulan's close personal servant, picks up. it's the bamboo tube of rebel names that khlai had taken off suriyen's body.

back at the suriyen house, pansaeng ofc uses the stab wound to get bulan to baby him. the two start getting lovey-dovey but are interrupted by jun who gives bulan the bamboo tube. when pansaeng takes the tube, he has a vision of last day leading up to his past self's death and hears suriyen's last wish in his head. pansaeng feels that he now knows why he was sent back in time.

pan wants to take the list of names to phraya san but bulan doesn't want him to leave, worried that something will happen to him. pan promises he'll return and sets off in the night.

this goes as you'd expect lol pan is attacked by khlai as well as narong and his lackies. as khlai and pan fight, khlai guesses that this "suriyen" isn't the real suriyen, surprising pan but he continues to play stupid. pansaeng beats khlai back and escapes but khlai eventually catches up to him. the two tussle and pansaeng tries to get khlai to see reason but khlai says there's no point since he's a rebel working for phonthep now. after saying that, a sword rips through his chest and he slumps over, revealing narong and his goon squad.

pan isn't very skilled in sword fighting and even though he beats narong's lackies, he is overpowered by narong after being slashed in the stomach. just as narong is about to cut him down for good, narong is stabbed.... through the chest.... from behind (mmm whatcha say~) by bulan!

while they continue to phraya san's, bulan reveals a shocking secret: he's known all along that the "suriyen" now isn't the suriyen from before. on the night the real suriyen died, bulan had followed him and found where he was buried and dug up his body, cremating it so his soul could be at rest.

"you and khun phi are the same person... just living at different times."

pan apologizes for not telling bulan sooner but bulan is more concerned pan's bleeding wound. pan asks if bulan hates him but bulan says he could never hate him. pansaeng then reveals that suriyen loved him deeply, but just didn't like the forced marriage and bulan's dad for trading his only son to repay a debt.

"i would like to accept the responsibility of loving and watching over you." (pansaeng to bulan)

they finally make it to phraya san's and give him the list of names. the rebels are captured and arrested, including phonthep, and they're put to death. pansaeng feels that suriyen can be at peace with the mission completed.

we're at chap 17 which is another NC chap 🤡 when the two are in bed together, pansaeng teases bulan and says the other bulan (duean) doesn't like him at all and bulan says to forgive that version of him. there's some mpreg talk 🫠 pan wants to impregnate bulan and bulan says if pan helps raise them, he can do it as much as he wants. after all THAT shsjwjjsjs pan says that even if he has to go back to his own time, he'll always love and miss bulan.

for a time, they live in peace until the burmese make an assault on ayutthaya, invading the city. pansaeng aware of what's to come, helps evacuate bulan, suriyen's mom, and a few servants. to keep the rebel soldiers away from them, pan tells jun to get them to the shelter suriyen had built.

pansaeng fights off the rebel soldiers but finds himself overpowered. as he's about to be struck down, bulan steps in front of the blade and is fatally wounded. in a rage, pansaeng kills all of the rebels before returning to bulan's side.

"i'm happy to have met you... i'm happy that you told me you love me. i ask, may we be able to love each other. together... for eternity."

bulan dies in pansaeng's arms and he is devastated. while mourning over bulan's body--suriyen's spirit appears and tells pan he must return to his own time. pan doesn't want to leave bulan but bulan's spirit also appears.

"i have to follow khun phi to the next life so the two of us can be together."

eventually, pan accepts that he has to return to his time and a golden light surrounds them and then pan is gone. suriyen and bulan hold hands and also disappear together to be reborn in a world where they can love each other and be together forever.

pansaeng wakes up in his condo in the present. he realizes it's the first day of the new school term -- the day he meets duean -- and rushes to get dressed so he makes it to the platform in time. after awhile he doesn't see duean and gets discouraged, deciding to board the train so he isn't late. suddenly, duean runs toward him and hugs him. pan realizes duean now has bulan's memories (and personality) and duean explains that he's been seeing bulan in his dreams, telling duean of suriyen and pansaeng.

pansaeng declares then boyfriends but duean doesn't agree, saying hasn't flirted with or hit on him and not to skip steps. pan agrees and says from now on he'll be hitting on him.

"their hearts still have love for each other, no matter what life they are in."

[kingstylesdaily]

Playtime With Harry Styles

via vogue.com

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. ���I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I���ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[hldailyupdate]

Playtime With Harry Styles

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles cuts a cool figure in this black-white-and-red-all-over checked coat by JW Anderson.

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

There are references aplenty in this look by Harris Reed, which features a Victoriana crinoline, 1980s shoulders, and pants of zoot-suit proportions.

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[hlupdate]

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy,setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboardcharts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicksalbum cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness,is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[davidmann95]

Comics this week (12/16/2020)?

Iron Man #4: Still good! Every issue I remain surprised that this is staying good, and yet it does!

The Immortal Hulk #41: A real good revisitation from a completely different angle of the ‘here’s why regular superheroes can’t fix what’s going on here’ thread from way back in #7, and god between this and Empyre Ewing writes such a perfect Ben Grimm.

King In Black: The Immortal Hulk: Surprised this didn’t end up a direct follow-up on the dangling thread left behind from the Absolute Carnage tie-in, but this was excellent so I’m not complaining.

Solid Blood #17: A new Robert Kirkman comic (joined by Ryan Ottley) announced right before its release like Die! Die! Die! before it, this one has the added gimmick of dropping its seventeenth issue with no preamble. The actual comic...well, the actual comic is basically 1963 for the 90s in the most fun way (it’s even printed on authentically fitting paper stock!), but the seeds of something much stranger are established and I have almost no clue what to expect next, quite literally. It must be nice to have that sort of fuck-you Walking Dead money, and I’m glad Kirkman’s choosing to do something as weird and interesting as this with it.

We Live #3: This one felt somewhat disjointed, but still an excellent experience.

Stillwater #4: I cannot believe I’m getting and enjoying so many horror comics on a regular basis now.

Once & Future #14: I keep saying I’m appreciating and decently enjoying this book while not connecting with it, but maybe it is winning me over.

We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #4: Get this book.

Decorum #6: I swear to god this series might be the prettiest comic of all time.

Commanders in Crisis #3: I didn’t review this one for AIPT, but this one’s a bit of a bridge between the first two issues tonally, both as grounded and as weird as the book has been thus far. I’m ready for it to return to something more bombastic, but I still have zero doubt this is going to be an all-timer when it wraps. No character interview with Ritesh Babu on AIPT this month, BUT in its place @deathchrist2000 has interviewed Prizefigher for Comic Book Herald on the subject of an in-universe James Bond novel written by Steven Moffat, and it rules.

Second Coming: Only Begotten Son #1: To borrow a line from @deathchrist2000, that sure is the death of Krypton as portrayed by the writer of The Flintstones. That’s the opposite of a complaint for me, but that’s sure what it is.

Superman #28: Kind of a perfect ending to Bendis’s tenure, in that it ends up totally whiffing some great ideas even if you can only mind so much given the quality of the character insight with the narration, but then there’s a Superman Moment so perfect it breaks your heart. Very glad Bendis will keep writing him in his half-announced Justice League with Marquez, and that he said today he’ll keep writing him elsewhere as well (I continue to assume he’s working on a Future State-era Jon as Superman book). Let’s see how well Action can put even more of a bow on it next week even with that art holding it back.

Batman #105: Does the ending here totally make sense? Ehhh. Am I willing to forgive any lapses in logic that get us way more Ghost-Maker? Hell yes. Speaking of which, he and Bruce totally used to be a thing off-panel, right? That’s the vibe I got from the opening in a BIG way.

Catwoman #28: I’ve been saying I’ve been loving it but also been waiting for what it looks like when it gets out from under Brubaker’s shadow, and I think I’m starting to see it, and it’s definitely my jam.

The Batman’s Grave #12: So someone either didn’t see or didn’t care that I explained I had already checked with my store to ensure my purchase of this wouldn’t result in any money going to Warren Ellis, so they messaged me spoilers for the ending of the issue in an attempt to ‘dissuade me’ from any further interest. A. Wherever the motives there are coming from, incredible dick move, for the love of god don’t do this. B. They misunderstood what happened in the ending? Wild. Anyway, it’s fine but also Ellis’s fourth-best Batman comic, strange if not at all undeserved that his now presumed/hopeful final Big Two comic, intended as a huge prestige Batman perennial (still confused why it wasn’t Black Label) and sure to forever be pushed as such if not for outside circumstances, ended up one of his passable third-tier works, destined to be remembered only as “that Batman comic DC had to finish publishing even after it turned out Warren Ellis was a piece of shit”.

Rorschach #3: Standard policy regarding my comments on this series applying: it was good.

Dark Nights: Death Metal #6: This one...kinda blew? Totally perfunctory moving-the-pieces into place issue for the most part, one or two nice moments aside. What a disappointing capstone to a story from 2017 to now I largely loved, hope it at least delivers a few haymakers with the finale.

Tales of the Dark Multiverse: Crisis on Infinite Earths: Mixed feelings. The beginning and ending are the sort of slaughter in mass of super-dopes without fanfare and on such a scale that it reminds me of World’s Funnest doing the exact same scenes for comedy, but that middle chunk? By god, Orlando makes me give a shit about the JSA, and that’s no mean feat, plus nice to see him write a few great Superman bits on his way out the door. Speaking of which, I’m mainly parsing this issue as an expression of Orlando’s bitterness over said exit and his time with DC as a comic about a big swaggering puffed-up dumbass living for destruction before whom our heroes our powerless, and a man has to sacrifice himself for a queer kid in servitude to it so that they can have a future and keep building that world. I liked it in balance, but I think I found it more interesting than good.

(Since I’m mentioning two Orlando books in here, worth noting I read this week his and Ricardo López Ortiz’s The Pull on Comixology. I’m not clear if it was released in single issues - I can’t quite wrap my head around TKO’s publishing model - but it’s basically an unholy mash between shonen manga, grungy noir crime comics, and a Crisis, and it rules and you should get it.)

The Green Lantern Season Two #10: What a strange, messy, fascinating capstone to Morrison’s DC work this series has turned out to be, and holy cow how has this been Liam Sharp lately? When did he get on this amazing Frazer Irving shit? And how is Ultrawar gonna happen and be resolved entirely within #12, unless it goes for a more abstract “The Ultrawar was really inside us all along!” conclusion?

[transparenttriumphzombie]

Harry Styles On Vogue

Source:

 https://www.vogue.com/article/harry-styles-cover-december-2020/amp?__twitter_impression=true

From Vogue MAGAZINE

Playtime With Harry Styles

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matchesfashion.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Jackie bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[thefreshfinds]

Propelled by the vibrant energy, treasured ambiance, connectivity, heart drenched food and melodies intertwining with the Saturday afternoon clouds —

There I stood in the emblem of The Philadelphia Music Festival, starving for a bite of fresh talent and so I decided to fill my plate with only the best manifolds of visionary hip hop, pop, R&B, trap and rock but little did I know I was in for a feast!

*Credits to @_brandoncaptures_ *

The first to perform was Monica Joelle, a dynamic Pop/R&B songstress from Philly that strikes your heart hard like Cupid’s arrow with her orientally sweet voice and cherry dripped instrumentals. She effortlessly plucks you with relatable lyrics (whether it’s about sticky situations, love or having a crush) and that’s why no one can seem to get enough. Monica started off with songwriting / singing lessons and from there she has continuously bloomed into her own sound as an artist, writing pieces that show off her complexity through set-ups and syllables. The songstress has only been making music until December 2017 but prior to that she has always been performer whether it was for dance or theater. The first song she ever created which was “Never Forget You” which is your ordinary heartbreak song but still relatable (and surely a track she had the most fun making.) To prepare for the festival she took the living room as her stage — using the microphone and speaker as the components for an astounding set off in real life. And in the future? Monica plans on releasing an EP and shooting out singles. (she can’t give us a name as of yet but I’m sure whatever it is will reflect the bubbly aura she conveys on and off the stage) The date will be revealed before you even know it but don’t take the risk of missing out on it.. just make sure to follow @MonicaJoelle.

“I’m not going to stop, I’m going to keep going. Forget what the haters say” Monica says.

SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/monicajoelle

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/55UAah5w59sJuQyekaRswr?si=wKn4V9eeSJaIM8XJtvZFAw

Fun Fact: Her favorite slang is “Jawn”

My favorite song? On My Mind.

The next performer to zazzle the crowd was conscious wordsmith, Teef. Teef is a laid back visionary from New Jersey (residing now in Philly) who puts your mind at ease through charismatic storytelling intertwined with a fusion of neo-soul hip-hop, concrete flows, very solid messages and speaker knocking beats that could make your head snap off your neck (literally). Resonated with A Tribe Called Quest, one could even say that he has their style down pat as he makes sure to transition a soothing ambience through the vibration of his rhymes and wit. Teef started his musical journey in 2015 after dropping his first project called “Hip Hop On Purpose”. He was always into music but this project was the pinnacle of his musicianship “I just stopped thinking about doing something and I finally just started doing it,” says Teef “I was very hesitant about becoming a rapper at first because of what was out on the mainstream. I don’t even rap about that stuff [being on the block, etc]. Then one day I performed at an open mic, people liked it, asked me to come back and since then I kept going.” Aside from spitting bars Teef also enjoys welding, reading informational novels, free styling and networking. “Earlier [before the festival] I was actually welding up a rail and it wasn’t even a joke!” Teef goes on to say “Genuinely I just love to be around people. [when asked about networking] I like being around other independent artist and feeding off of their energy and ideas.” To prepare, Teef didn’t do much but go with the motion of the [creative] ocean and sway his natural repertoire in the ears of the ones close by. “I picked my songs when I got here. But I don’t always put my set together until I get there.” Teef says “I just went with the vibes”. One song that Teef enjoyed making the most was his first song “Get Free” because it allowed him to showcase his style to other people. “It was really random. It was made at three o clock in the morning and I really didn’t have an intent but it just hit me out of the blue. I crafted it in my own way. It was the most memorable time for me. That’s why I consider it to be fun because it just happened.” Common to persona, Teef’s favorite slang is “coolin” and the number one person that he looks up to in history is Bob Marley because he brought people together (and even squashed beef between politicians). “He was all about the people and the community”. Teef is currently running a weekly radio show called “Most Slept On Radio” on 98.5FM (it covers the Philadelphia area). He also runs Table Talk with Teef on Tuesday’s.

“I’m just growing with my artistry”

You can follow him on

Instagram : @realteef03

Bandcamp : https://lateef.bandcamp.com/Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wNgFnLMKH5Dui6DdHSoUK?si=We2MVY6jSE6eut8W_CQaGg

My favorite song? Strangers in the Night

Wafting their chantable ad libs through heavy marijuana smoke, this group’s sound floats smoothly to your ear canals. The next act, The Joint Cheefs allowed me to let my conscious free through their use of moderate boom bap and sharp witted lyrics… but to be more clear, I can say that this trio changes the high experience by implicating an old feel of New York rap through their wrap of rhymes *that solely support the 420 movement* and calm aesthetic. To begin Geo The Rican, Sonny Blue Note and Loud Pack Ralph formulated as a triad one day while working in their studio in the Bronx. “We are producers and engineers so the idea itself just grew organically” says Geo the Rican. They have been making music for some time but to get to where they are now they pretty much just smoked a lot (no pun intended) and became more personal with their music, putting their trials and tribulations through their rhymes and as a result they have been gaining a peak of listeners on a daily basis. To prepare for the Philly Festival they answered with “smoking weed” but ultimately it was through the power of fun. “We take the music seriously but we try not to take ourselves too serious.” they go on to say “We take pride in our sound far as recording and making it.”To separate theirselves from the rest, the Joint Cheefs actually live through what they rap about. “We’re in a lane that we want to be in. It’s not too crowded, some people might say it’s our own and we’re going to hot box all the way to the top.” Aside from their recent release of “Never Canoe” on April 20th 2018, the Joint Cheefs are currently working on their album “Jars” which will be on all platforms by November 31st. When it comes to favorite strands, Sonny Blue Note enjoys Indica because it helps him sleep, Geo the Rican chooses Sativa because it helps him stay focused and Loud Pack Ralph enjoys hybrid because he just wants to get high. Fun fact: Their favorite slang is between “BroGod” and “Deadass” because they love to pay homage to their hometown.

You can follow them on

Instagram - @thejointcheefs

Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/thejointcheefs/the-joint-cheefs-n-high-c

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/1DQg3ISncFAuWAdDhebBMc?si=Q-Lu8Xv9QP-pfqkDU9tflg

My favorite song: It’s a tough one. It’s between “N High C” & “The Art of Hotboxing”

Lights on (meaning the sunlight of course) and centered on the stage, the next act to captivate me was Almost Famous who reels his listeners in with a hook of merciless R&B and a fair amount of auto tune. Generally speaking, Mr Famous has the 2000 feel of soul mastered perfectly as he dashes platforms with a similar production that Ne-Yo or even Genuine would use. The difference between him and the artist mentioned though is that he adds his own twist of dominating words, making sure to switch it up through trap and pop (while also warning his mysterious lover from time to time that they could be replaced in a heart beat) But don’t assume that his heart is locked up in a cage, Mr Famous still has a soft side to him and shows it from time to time. To begin, Almost Famous started off his career as a background dancer for a mass of Philly artist. “Hearing them, I realized that maybe I should create my own music so I started writing, perfecting melodies and harmonies and going to shows.” Famous says. This West Philadelphian has been doing music for 4 years but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s slowing down. Almost Famous grinds hard through releasing new singles and it even shows through his stage presence! “[To prepare for the festival] I had a few shows coming up, so I just kept on rolling with my other ones.” says Almost Famous. One song that Almost Famous enjoyed making the most is “Options” because it was during a time when he had to walk to work in the midst of a strike. “I heard the beat and it was mine from there. If it wasn’t for the strike, it wouldn’t be what it is now.” Fundamentally, Almost Famous would collaborate with Jasmine Sullivan if he was given the chance because her song writing skills and singing is perfect. But the bonus? Jasmine Sullivan is also from Philly. Even though Almost Famous shows love to his hometown he is not too fond of the people who run the Philly Hip Hop Awards “About a year or so they dogged me out but now that I’m apart of a new record label, they try to follow my moves and the label I’m with [Spit It Out Entertainment].” Famous goes on to say. As for his opinion on DMX? He thinks that DMX is a legend. “I feel like he’s been through a lot and a lot of people try to discredit him.”

Almost Famous’ favorite slang is “you drawlin’. “ He also considers himself a morning person because that’s when he’s able to get the day started. His project “Growth” will be released in November. Almost Famous also wants to give a shoutout to Spit it Out Entertainment.

My favorite song? Options (but the other song title can’t be given out. I will let the fans know when “Growth” is on streaming platforms)

You can follow him:

Instagram - @almostfamous215

YouTube - https://youtu.be/ilkKpQ0X8us

*Credits to Brother IB Photography @brother_ib *

The next act to glide his angelic floetry to the streets of Philly was Mashich, an upcoming trap soul artist from Philly who keeps things interesting through a singsong vocal pattern and propulsive beats but to stand out from the other singers that took a part of the festival, Mashich graced the crowd with silver printed dance moves. Even though Mashich has been singing since he was 7, he started taking his craft seriously in the past year. He’s originally from Aiken, South Carolina but he moved to Philly 7 years ago. When it comes to his favorite slang from his new home, he says it’s “d*ckhead” or “f*ck out of here”. To prepare for the Philly Festival, Mashich practiced nonstop. “I’m really big on practicing so I utilized any free time and space I had.” Mashich goes on to say. “I blasted music from my speaker, went over the song and got my movements down. From there I was able to find a form that helped to present myself and my style.”To stabilize his vocal chords, he drinks a lot of tea and does a range of warm ups while making sure to sing out of his diaphragm. In addition, Mashich would collab with Daniel Caesar if he had the opportunity. “All of his music is super creative and how he keeps his vocal deliveries organized is really dope,” says Mashich “I could learn a couple of things from him.”What makes this crooner so different from others is the thing he plans on bringing an old school feel back to R&B. “I hope that through my unique songwriting and vocal structure I am able to push other artist to do the same” All in all he wants good fortunes for the human race. Because let’s face there’s more to life. Love is limitless. “Miss My Dawgs” is currently out on streaming platforms. Be on the lookout for his debut EP “Small Town, Big City” which will cover his coming of age story. Leaving his house and growing with Philly.

“Whatever you believe you can do, you can do that sh*t. You can much success and much love”

You can follow him on:

SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/mashichmusic/miss-my-dawgs

Instagram - @k.ing.tut

Last to wow the crowd away was Bronx native Captain DMac who “makes your neck stretch like an ostrich”. Ticking the spinal chords of those familiar with dancehall and pop, Captain DMac’s brush of sultry vocal play and enticing melodies took me back to a tropical island that effortlessly illuminates peace, love and good vibes towards it’s community. I couldn’t help but to move my hips to the vigorous, self pulsating beats to follow.

We [Luis and I] were instantly allured. We needed to find out more and so we did.

Captain DMac started making music when he was in high school. “I was doing songs for different environments and people or surroundings,” DMac goes on to say “Anything that would happen I would make a song about it. I would often recite Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it Like It’s Hot” [in that time period] too because he’s one of my favorite artist and then someone said “Hey you should make your own song” so I decided to try it. The first cover I did was “Dreams Money Could Buy” by Drake and ever since I have been creating my own songs.”His tracks are mostly embed with a homage to his culture and admirable women and when he spits, he SPITS. Before switching genres, Captain DMac was just an aspiring rhymester who made headlines with his hit single “Big Ol Booty” because of the line from the song “Stretching out her neck like an ostrich” (and it became so well known that it went viral on Facebook and Worldstar, gaining over 8 million views to date.) However, Captain DMac didn’t get the credit he deserved but eventually he was gaining more recognition and reclaimed what was his. A lot of people [A&R’s] saw his songs for what it is and not what it could be, but his close ones thought otherwise. “One day I was talking to my boy and he said “Yo you’re Jamaican you should really touch that dancehall scene because there’s a lot of American artist that are doing it.” and I said “You know what you’re right let’s try it. The first one I made was Hold (which received positive feedback) and from there I said to myself let’s keep creating these vibes.” says Captain DMac. “There was a lot of obstacles to get to where I am. I met a lot of good people, sometimes bad. But I continue to strive and I surround myself around people who also strive. They have to work hard towards what they want to get and that’s what my team does. We just trying to get it. It all starts with good music.” Captain DMac also says that “Just Me & You” was his favorite song to make, “I recruited my friend to do light vocals and in the end he sounded like Super Mario.” All in all what makes him unique from the rest is his pen game. “I can have multiple versions of one song”

Captain DMac will continue to touching the Dancehall scene & the people.

He will be dropping two EP’s very soon.

His single “Think About” ft Juanialys is out right now

Fun fact: His favorite slang is yerr

&

He is a boxers guy.

You can find him at:

Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/captaindmac

Instagram - @captaindmac

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/5p154fD2gshCzENn8a4W8b?si=YLJ645G7TEOZSWFjQuj47Q

At its best, Philly Music Festival will continuously flourish as a platform for artist on the rise.

It’s more than just an event, it’s a spot that’ll reign of harmony, inspiration and positive energy.

By: Natalee Gilbert 🌞

[howaminotinthestrokesyet]

Behind The Album: In Rainbows

In October 2007, Radiohead released their seventh studio album in a self-released pay whatever download release. A physical release would later be distributed via XL Recordings. The band had gone completely independent after the completion of their contract with EMI Records. In 2004, they went on a long break following the end of the tour in support of Hail To the Thief. Phil Selway would comment on this hiatus. “It was definitely time to take a break. There was still a desire amongst us to make music, but also a realisation that other aspects of our lives were being neglected. And we'd come to the end of our contract, which gives you a natural point to look back over at what you've achieved as a band." During this time, Thom Yorke released his first solo album The Eraser, while Jonny Greenwood scored his first two film projects. Writing for In Rainbows began in early 2005 with the decision to work with a producer besides Nigel Godrich. The reason for this decision is a point of contention between band members on whether the group wanted to hear a new voice or Godrich was simply too busy with other projects. In August, the band began recording sessions as they updated their progress on Dead Space, the group’s official blog. Progress on the album was very slow as Thom Yorke would later explain. “We spent a long time in the studio just not going anywhere, wasting our time, and that was really, really frustrating." A variety of reasons have been given for the studio issues including the long hiatus, no deadline, and the fact they had all become fathers. Ed O’Brien would say that breaking up was actually considered at the time, but kept going “because when you got beyond all the shit and the bollocks, the core of these songs were really good.” In December, Radiohead hired Skip Stent to produce the new release, who had previously worked with Bjork and U2. He did not last very long as the producer told them their recordings so far were not good enough. In order to try and create some positive energy for In Rainbows, the group decided to tour in May and June of 2006. The live shows helped immensely as Thom Yorke would say, “We basically had all these half-formed songs, and we just had to get it together. And rather than it being a nightmare, it was really, really good fun, because suddenly everyone is being spontaneous and no one's self-conscious because you're not in the studio ... It felt like being 16 again." After the tour, they brought Nigel Godrich back in to produce the record, which according to Yorke definitely helped them to get focused quickly. Recording started up again at a country house in Wiltshire, England, which had some productive sessions. The house was very odd as Yorke would describe it for the media. It was “derelict in the stricter sense of the word, where there's holes in the floor, rain coming through the ceilings, half the window panes missing ... There were places you just basically didn't go. It definitely had an effect. It had some pretty strange vibes." These October sessions produced “Bodysnatchers'' and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” as Yorke would post that the album was well on its way now. In December 2006, the sessions moved to Godrich’s home studio in Covent Garden in London. The band completed “Nude” and “Videotape” during this time before moving on to Radiohead’s home studio in Oxfordshire. The LP would finally be completed in June 2007. One of the major priorities for In Rainbows was that the record needed to be “concise” as they felt Hail To the Thief had been too long and bloated. Thom Yorke would observe, “I believe in the rock album as an artistic form of expression. In Rainbows is a conscious return to this form of 45-minute statement ... Our aim was to describe in 45 minutes, as coherently and conclusively as possible, what moves us." The sessions had produced 16 tracks, but the band decided on ten with the intention of releasing the others on a second disc at a later date.

In Rainbows represented art rock, electronica, and experimental rock. The opening track “15 Step” was actually inspired by the Peaches song, “Fuck The Pain Away.” “Nude” had actually been initially written during the sessions for OK Computer, but never used. Colin Greenwood rewrote the bassline making it much more appropriate for In Rainbows. Although the group performed a song entitled Reckoner in 2001, the In Rainbows “Reckoner” only has the title in common because they exist as two different songs. “Bodysnatchers” would be described by Yorke as “Wolfmother and Neu! meets dodgy hippy rock.” The most difficult song on the album came in “Videotape,” which Yorke described as “absolute agony.” With the help of Godrich and Jonny Greenwood, the track was made quite minimally into a simple piano ballad. The lyrics on the record were described by the singer as “that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something else' ... it's similar to OK Computer in a way. It's much more terrifying." The record’s central theme represented being human and reaching the conclusion that we are all going to die someday. Yorke would make clear that no part of his lyrics are political in any way on the album. “Bodysnatchers” would be partly inspired by Victorian ghost stories and the 1972 novel, The Stepford Wives. “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” was inspired by the disarray Yorke witnessed when he would go out on the weekends in Oxford. Once again, Stanley Donwood created the cover art for the album, eventually deciding upon an image of a rainbow, but a toxic one at that. The cover art would not be released for the digital version, but only for the physical cd’s and vinyl.

With the release of In Rainbows, Radiohead offered a free download for it in a pay what you want pricing structure. Such a release had never been done before from a group as big as Radiohead. Colin Greenwood would say that the band did this in order to avoid leaks and regulated playlists via radio and iTunes. Thom Yorke explained their logic in an interview with BBC. “We have a moral justification in what we did in the sense that the majors and the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans ... Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash." As for the release itself, the band used a private server network in order to successfully distribute the ZIP file to fans. The file would be a DRM free 160 kB download, but diehard audiophile fans would complain that they wanted a file with more kB. After two months, the download was removed, but you could still get the album in a physical format through XL Recordings primarily. The band eliminated any thought of making it a download only release because they wanted a physical object to give to fans. In Rainbows emerged as the first release from the band to be made available on streaming services like Amazon and iTunes. The band retained all rights to the master recordings, while record labels would need to obtain a license from the group in order to use any part of the record. The pay what you want structure created quite a stir within the music world with some applauding it, while others criticized the move. Mojo would call it a revolution in the way new music is released. Time called it “easily the most important release in the history of the music business.” New Musical Express praised the band for bringing together everyone at the same time to hear new music. U2 complimented Radiohead for their courage and imagination in trying to create a new way to speak to the audience. Despite all of this praise, the release did have several detractors, most notably musicians. Lily Allen felt that it sent the wrong message to less successful artists that you will need to give away your music for free in order to get anywhere with an audience. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon said the same thing noting that it essentially made everyone else look bad for not giving their music away for free. Guardian journalist Will Hodgkinson commented that Radiohead had decimated the playing field for everyone else with this move. U2’s manager would even argue that 60-70 percent of Radiohead fans pirated the record via torrent. In retrospect, the band never used the same pricing structure ever again for any release making pay what you want an experiment, and nothing more. In 2013, Thom Yorke admitted that they might have been doing what companies like Apple and Google wanted all along when you consider the current state of streaming music.

If the controversy over a pay what you want release was not enough, the band also battled with EMI over In Rainbows. In August 2007, EMI was purchased by the company Terra Firma and new owner Guy Hands. Radiohead was on the verge of completing the record when Hands made a visit. They had hoped to re-sign the group, but suffered a major disappointment when they learned of the decision to self release the record. Ed O’Brien said the group did not realize their importance to the company, while Hands believed only a big offer would persuade Radiohead to sign a new deal. O’Brien would later say, “It was really sad to leave all the people [we'd worked with] ... But Terra Firma don't understand the music industry." The real sticking point came in the fact that Terra Firma refused to give the band control of their master recordings. Thom Yorke would later deny Terra Firma’s claim that the band wanted an extraordinary amount of money. A week after the group released a special edition of In Rainbows, EMI released a boxed set of material recorded by the band during the time of their contract. The Guardian would call it revenge for not signing with the label.

Most critics praised In Rainbows across the board. Many reviews noted the fact that the quality of the release was not overshadowed by the significance of the pay what you want structure. New Musical Express would comment, “Radiohead reconnecting with their human sides, realising you [can] embrace pop melodies and proper instruments while still sounding like paranoid androids ... this [is] otherworldly music, alright." Rob Sheffield would observe that there were no duds on the album. Other qualities mentioned in various reviews included warmth, beauty, and more human. Robert Christgau would say that there was less Thom Yorke on the album, which turned out to be a good thing. Many end of year best of lists named In Rainbows the number one album of the year including Billboard, Mojo, and Pop Matters. They were ranked in the top five for Pitchfork, AV Club, and Q. Rolling Stone and Spin would put the album sixth on their year end list. The release would be ranked as one of the best of the decade by several publications including New Musical Express, Rolling Stone, Paste, and The Guardian. The LP would go on to be nominated for The Mercury Prize and several Grammys including a win for Best Alternative Record for the latter. As far as sales of the album, those were difficult to gauge due to the unconventional nature of the record’s release. Some research was released providing what the average user actually paid for a download, but Radiohead dismissed the statistics as inaccurate arguing that In Rainbows made more money digitally than any other release combined. According to their music publisher, the physical copies of In Rainbows sold quite well, which Pitchfork observed on their site. “Radiohead could release a record on the most secretive terms, basically for free, and still be wildly successful, even as industry profits continued to plummet.” According to the media measurement company BigChampagne, the release was downloaded illegally 400,000 times. The digital version of the album did not make it eligible for the UK Album Charts, but upon the release of the physical album the release went straight to number one. The album did the same thing in the United States on the Billboard 200. The vinyl version of the LP became the best selling record of 2008. In 2009, the group finally released the second disc for In Rainbows. In his review, David Fricke of Rolling Stone would say that the bonus material was not worth the $80 price tag, but the tracks represent vintage Radiohead. In 2016, the group made the second disc available on all streaming services.

[dreamings-free]

By Hamish Bowles November 13, 2020

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matchesfashion.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Jackie bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[bisexual-books]

Prepub Review - Ramona Blue by Julie Murphy

Guess who managed to get their hands on an advance reader copy of the year’s most anticipated bisexual book? 

Before we start, all our book reviews contain MASSIVE SPOILERS and this one will be no different.  Which means if you want to read this book spoiler free when it is released in May, turn back now!   

Also, I have a LOT of thoughts on this book and how it plays into cultural narratives around non-monosexuality, so buckle up cuz this is gonna be a long one.  

Everybody ready?  Got a snack?  Lets do this thing.

The most important thing you need to know about Ramona Blue is that its not a story about a lesbian who is “cured” by straight boy dick.  Not even a little bit. Ramona flat-out says she is not straight and shuts characters down HARD when they make that assumption.  There is no way you can read this book and walk away with the conclusion that it plays into a homophobic trope of men “turning” lesbians unless you are just willfully ignoring both subtext and very explicit text.  

The connection between Ramona and Freddie (the straight guy) centers a lot of the emotional action, but it unfolds slowly and with a lot of deliberate choices.  It’s also an interracial relationship in which he teaches her about blackness as much as she teaches him about queerness.  The whole thing has a super social justice vibe about it.  The characters make mistakes and missteps, but they (and the reader) are allowed to learn from them.   The book is also grounded in the strong relationship between Ramona and her sister Hattie, creating something that is more akin to a classic coming of age story than a romance novel.  

Now let's go deeper.   

Bisexual feminist author Shiri Eisner writes a lot about how bisexuals operate in the gray area, the mushy middle, the space between homo/hetero.  We are inherently boundary busters and shit destabilizers.  I couldn’t help but think of her work while I was reading this book because at its core, Ramona Blue’s overarching theme is about finding oneself when your shit destabilizes and all that is left is the gray area.

That’s it.  That’s the theme.  This entire book is about boundary busting and category destabilizing.  

Ramona starts the book with a strong identity, not just as a lesbian but believing she knows exactly what the rest of her life will be.  By the end, she has moved into questioning not only her orientation but everything she had planned for life after high school.  For example, she starts the book absolutely positive that she is not going to college, not leaving her small town, and not leaving the trailer where she shares a bedroom with her flighty, pregnant, older sister. She believes fanatically that she needs to stay put, and provide for the new baby emotionally and financially.  She ends the book starting a pre-college program in another town after their trailer was destroyed in a tornado.  

The subtext here is about as subtle as a brick to the face.    

As far as her sexual identity, the book ends with her still unsure which label is right.  Her sexuality is woven into that larger theme via character development that is deliberate and thoughtful.  This book takes place over the course of a school year, giving Ramona plenty of time to examine herself and her options. And importantly, she ends the book liking herself despite her uncertain future on several fronts. 

Don’t get me wrong -- I would have loved it if Ramona came out as bi in the end.  Because I see Ramona as clearly bi (or some other flavor of non-monosexual).  I come to this conclusion not just because she dates/has sex with a dude, but because there are a few little moments where she appreciates boys in a way that her lesbian friend clearly does not.  She shares a profound emotional intimacy with Freddie in addition to overtly wanting him sexually.  And her responses to the pressure to ‘pick the gay side’ are familiar to anyone who has come out as bi.  But in the end, she doesn’t choose that word.  

However I want to make clear that Ramona Blue doesn’t fall into the trope of the missing B word.  She doesn’t react poorly to being asked if she is bi, she doesn’t insist that she just looooves people, doesn’t spit biphobia, put up with biphobic jokes, or wax about how she just doesn’t like labels.  Murphy doesn’t treat it as an unspeakable thing.  Ramona is considering if she is bi, but she just doesn’t know.

And that is okay.   It is okay to be questioning.  It’s ok to write books about teens who are questioning where they end the story still questioning. The problem I often have with bi representation is that questioning stories go to ridiculous lengths to avoid the word ‘bisexual’, or handle bisexuality in biphobic ways.  Ramona Blue does none of this.    As much as I want more explicitly bi literature, there is also a lot of value in this kind of questioning story because it is so rarely explored in ways that are this deliberate and well written.   I appreciate Ramona Blue opening up a place in YA lit for a questioning story that is thematically sound and handled with such delicacy.

In queer culture, questioning is often portrayed exclusively as the stop between straightsville and gay town, but the reality is so much more complicated than that.  For so many bisexuals, questioning comes around again after first identifying as gay or lesbian.  For so many bisexuals, we continue questioning even when we pick a bi label.   For so many bisexuals, questioning is always asking if they are ‘bi enough’.  The bi experience of questioning is different than the gay/lesbian experience with questioning.  

This book is touching on some of that difference and that complexity.  It is destabilizing the neat tidy categories of gay and straight.  I can understand that for monosexual people that can be scary and cause them to react in knee-jerk defensive ways to protect their own privilege.  It can be offputting to read a book that centers questioning through a nonmonosexual queer lens instead of a ‘traditional’ gay/lesbian one.  

I believe that is what is behind the rush of lesbians (who haven’t read the book) and would much rather deny the complexities of non-monosexual experience and instead label this book as ‘lesbophobic’.   This book is only lesbophobic if you believe anyone who identifies as a lesbian should be forced to only/always be a lesbian because there is no room for questioning once that label has been applied.  

Reading Ramona Blue made me remember Adam Silvera speaking at the Andersons YA Lit Con in 2016 about how he is so often assumed to be a gay author because he writes so many gay characters, but he too is questioning.  He’s not sure if he is bi, but he’s become less comfortable over time with saying that he’s gay when he himself doesn’t know.  That is exactly the feel Ramona Blue is going for.  

So to sum up, Ramona Blue is not lesbophobic unless you’re a giant biphobe, has great depth and themes, and it fills a much-needed gap in the YA queer lit canon.    The end result is a smart and enjoyable read. 

- Sarah 

PS: Because the last time I talked about this book we got a rash of threatening, cruel, biphobic, and generally fucked up asks, they’re temporarily turned off.  If you have a response to this review, reblog it and own it publically.   Because I’ve removed your option to lowkey tell me I deserve to be coercively raped fuckface

[gigsoupmusic]

In conversation with Freya Beer

With her blend of powerful poetic lyricism, dynamic music and striking vocals, it is no wonder that Freya Beer is creating a real buzz on the alternative music scene. The young songstress has been praised by BBC Music Introducing and BBC Radio 6 Music who made her excellent 2019 single ‘Dear Sweet Rosie’ their track of the week. Freya has also supported renowned artists such as Brix & the Extricated, Kristeen Young (who is also known for her collaborations with David Bowie, Morrisey and The Damned), and none other than iconic punk poet John Cooper Clarke. After already achieving so much even before the release of a debut album, it is exciting to see what else we can expect from this captivating artist. I was able to speak to Freya on the phone and began the interview with a surreal yet unavoidable question about life in lockdown and the opportunity to be creative in spite of such unprecedented circumstances: “With this whole situation nobody knows what’s going on and nobody knows when it’s going to end but you take it day by day. If one day I feel like writing something then I will but on some days if I don’t feel in the mood to write then I’m not going to force myself. However, I definitely feel like having all this time helps my creative juices because I can discover music, read books, gain more knowledge and also record more demos and experiment with different sounds.” Not to dwell on these challenging times, we move on to talk about the impressive endeavor of creating a record label. In 2019 Freya Beer launched Sisterhood Records from which she released her powerful single ‘Dear Sweet Rosie’. “It was suggested through my management which I didn’t even think of to do. Before I released my first two singles ‘Bike Boy’ and ‘Six Months’ under Freya Beer but now that I’m releasing new music under a name it just looks more established.” Freya is a big fan of the legendary bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke, and explains how she discovered him through her “love of poetry and punk music from the 1970s and through looking into different decades of music as well as the poetry side of things.” She also supported John Cooper Clarke in December 2019 and explains that this incredible opportunity “was through doing an interview with him for my dissertation, it was a very surreal experience to support someone you look up to and of course, lyrics are my main thing.” The influence of poetry and literature is inherent in Freya’s music and often delicately intertwined in her lyrics. For example, ‘Dear Sweet Rosie’ dazzled with words constructed from Allen Ginsberg’s ‘An Asphodel’ and Anna Sewell’s classic novel Black Beauty. It was such literary references which complimented the heavy riffs and strong percussion. In contrast to the punch of ‘Dear Sweet Rosie’, Beer’s most recent track ‘Arms Open Wide’ is stunning in its ethereal and multifaceted instrumentation. She explains that “with this new single, writing wise it was more about the sound whereas with Rosie the reading of literature helped to build my story for the song. With ‘Arms OpenWide’ it was more about the music such as the tubular bells because overall I wanted it to be quite ceremonial and so the lyrics sort of just came along. I usually feel with writing music it's always lyrics first but with this song it was different because with my past singles the instrumentation is just me, guitar and drums, whereas for ‘Arms Open Wide’ I’ve got bells I’ve got reverb going on in the background, guitar, and I’ve got a lead guitar as well.” Freya is also influenced by art and visuals which are demonstrated in her music videos. She explains the setting and idea behind the enchanting accompanying video for ‘Arms Open Wide’: “It was a safe house which I never knew you could hire which was really cool. Visually for that video I was leaning more towards photographers -there is a photographer called Francesca Woodman and her visuals are very bleak looking but they also have that abandoned house vibe that is quite ethereal. There is definitely Pre-Raphaelite influence with the flowers and the candles I love to incorporate that because that’s my main niche, that’s what I love.” For ‘Dear Sweet Rosie’ Freya collaborated with Andy Hargreaves from I Am Kloot who provided the prodigious drumming for the track. “That was really unexpected and was through Phil , I recorded that in Manchester last year. We were just looking at session drummers and it was only by luck that Andy was available to drum and I just thought that was mad, like Andy from I am Kloot! But his drumming made the track what it is. It’s that big sound and he really helped accomplish and compliment what I was doing.” After receiving a positive reception from ‘Dear Sweet Rosie’ and from the release of her other excellent singles, the prospect of Freya Beer releasing a debut album in the near future is eagerly anticipated. “I’m currently working on my next single so maybe at the end of the year an album would be out because I have all this material which I would love to record but I feel like not every song is a single. I already have artwork ideas and visuals… there’s going to be a cat, but bringing it back to this current situation I don’t know how that will pan out, so maybe at the start of next year. It’s exciting though because this time last year I never thought I would be where I am at the moment.” Talking future plans and the increasingly challenging notion of returning to normality, Freya also states how she would love to perform at festivals: “I think the atmosphere of a festival I would love to be part of because it’s where people discover new music, whereas with gigs you pay the ticket and you know the band before. Festivals are also a great atmosphere creatively.” Finally, I ask Freya what music she has been listening to recently: “ I’ve been listening to an artistcalled Jesse Jo Stark, she’s an American artist. Her visuals and her sound are amazing, she recently did a cover of John Prine’s ‘Angel from Montgomery’ and I think it’s so beautiful. I’ve been listening to a lot of older music like Brian Wilson from The Beach Boys just because it has that Californian sound. I’ve also been listening to Michael Kiwanuka’s new album, his visuals are very 70s and I love that look. Those three are the main artists at the moment but I try to discover new music every day, I have the time.” As with many musicians, Freya has had to reschedule shows and before you will be able to see her owning the stage at a festival, live dates are currently set for October 1st in Brighton and October 22nd in London. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5zaq0Jh3WE Read the full article