Despite being exceedingly hot, charming, and charismatic, I’ve never had as many gay men in my DMs as when I posted about Harry Styles’s cover for the December 2020 print edition of this very magazine. For his maiden Vogue cover story, Styles wore a variety of traditionally female garments, including skirts and dresses with tux jackets and a Harris Reed Victoriana crinoline. In my post, I briefly mentioned Harry’s perfect breaking wave of a quiff and dozens of men (nearly all queer to some degree) flooded my DMs. (If anyone asks, I don’t officially read them.) As straight people on Twitter bemoaned the death of masculinity, as they called for society to bring back manly men, the main critique from my adamantly woke messengers was that Harry was undeserving of the cover; that Harry in a dress was boring and yawnsome; and that platforming Harry Styles took something away from anyone who wasn’t already white, cis, and straight.
Harry in a dress is back. For background, for the entirety of his Love on Tour solo tour, Styles has been kitted out in custom Gucci looks by Alessandro Michele, a mix of billowy masculine shirts and wide-leg slacks, all overseen by styling mensch Harry Lambert, who frankly has the Midas touch when it comes to event dressing. For Halloween night at Madison Square Garden, Styles curtsied somewhere over the rainbow with a bejeweled homage to Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, replete with frilly knickers and two-tone ruby booties. (If you haven’t already seen the pictures, I’m assuming your router is off?)
Despite the costume connotations, people once again lost their heads over Harry Styles in a dress, and the themes of white cis straightness zipped back into the public conscious. This comes mere weeks after Billy Porter, Oscars red-carpet dress champion™, questioned Harry’s journey to dress wearing, claiming he himself “changed the whole game” of gender-nonconforming fashion. (All Styles had to do, according to Porter, was “be white and straight.”) I don’t want to detract from Billy Porter and what he’s achieved. If anything, the micro-spat reminds me how easy it is for the internet to hear a person of color say something meaningful (perhaps with sentimentality overshadowing bare facts) and immediately backlash them into silence.
As for Harry, is anyone genuinely affronted? Desire is amorphous, and Styles isn’t keen on labels, but until he is unequivocally linked to Pete Davidson, the reigning king of dating, let’s assume his relative heterosexuality. Should a straight man at the top of his pop game be responsible for our collective notions of gender and sexuality? Am I the only person who thinks the pressure on Harry Styles to give us a running commentary on masculinity today is a bit…ridiculous? I don’t think conforming to your own gender should be a prerequisite of October 31, so, to me, the dress is harmless; it is pure costume, a Halloween flex. The tour as a whole is reverently referential. Even from a distance you can see Prince, Elvis, Mercury, Bowie. This weekend we saw Judy Garland.
I guess I’m wondering if we’re ever going to move beyond a boy in a dress being news? Being something unusual and arch? Being somehow odd and sensational? The Love on Tour mood is very joy heavy, very communal, very “feel free to be whoever it is you’ve always wanted to be,” so the divisive retaliation from people online who appear to be fairly clued up on gender feels even more off, even more disappointing. Can the über-woke see that Harry’s surface nonconformity is genuinely opening eyes for mainstream, conservative America? I thought this was the future liberals wanted? Maybe we can find a way to all be friends of Dorothy, even if only for one night?
