#but i feel like we well and truly support zayn and liam

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

I barely go on twitter anymore cause it's fucking toxic and maybe i should never go back at all cause few days ago i open the damn app and the first thing i saw is a zarrie and a larrie shipper arguing about what ship is the realest and throwing at each other faces """proofs""" (in fucking 2023) of how hword was hinting in his songs/interviews ecc at his romantic passionete relationship with one of them like lmao i can't even get fully mad cause it's so fucking ridiculous. I wanna make clear i dislike everyone who after 2000 years of the band ending still ships romantically any of them but call me biased while all shippers are toxic in a way, no one reached the level of the ships who involve styles as part of the pair damn not even ziammies are that crazy

The interesting part is the huge magiority of larries,zarries, narries ecc are actually pretty much solo harries they don't really care,listen or support the other part involved in the ship they just need those men to fulfill their weird fantasies.

For what i saw harries can be divided into 2 categories the one who ship him with someone of the band or taylor swift and the ones who totally despise the other four and taylor

Still they seem to believe thier own fav alone isn't interesting enough cause why would they argue about who their fav music is about if they truly are there cause they enjoy it or why would they bring any of the orhers, mostly zayn and louis, i'll never understand the obsession harries have with these two (actually maybe i do i'm obsessed with them as well after all) but why bringing them into every success/achievement their fav reaches, why bring the others down in order lift him up cause every time they compare him to one of the other even if they love to blab about how he is more succesfull and rich and ecc but we all know why he is all of that don't we they are just treating the others like the standard, styles release a new music video so let's pretend to be a louie so i can bring him into the table and insult him, didn't they made associations with taylor too? I didn't want to look into the video cause i despise him and since i appreciate and admire taylor a lot i don't focus on the ship i just give attention to her music and her success (harries wouldn't know what i mean) also styles gets nominated for a grammy? Let's talk about how zayn isn't enough to get one (even if everyone atp should know they are fucking racists and elitists) louis releases a documentary? Harries tries to sabatage it cause they think their fav is more deserving of one and it would be more interesting, someone makes a funko pop of zayn? Let's harrass them cause it should have been one of styles instead cause he's so much better and ecc ecc there's many more examples but you get what i'm trying to say? Do they think their fav isn't enough on his own? that he isn't that interesting and worth of time and attention by himself they feel the need to either associate him romantically with other celebrities to write fanfictions, or to bring them into everything he says or does in order to tear them apart like they did with liam after the paul interview everyone was praising styles for eating a scorpion(?? i don't even remember) in order to not bad mouth the others while liam was so openly disrespecting zayn as if they ever cared about him as if they weren't the first ones to say shit about zayn. Listen call me crazy but i'm seriously starting to believe harries don't really care about styles he is the moment, the celebrity everyone is talking about (good or bad doesn't really matter to them) but do they genuinely care about his music, his art? I don't think so, tbh i'm only annoyed cause i wish they would leave the other guys and taylor alone, i think he has the fans he deserves disrespectful,invasive and hateful he thinks low of them and they think low of him perfect if they didn't bring others into the mix

It’s clear that Harries stan the trend of the moment, and they’ll like whatever is most popular because it’s been pushed to the front of pop culture zeitgeist.

But it’s also pretty clear that— as Gertrude Stein said— for Harry, “there’s no there there.”

He’s been built by older and more clever men, from Irving Azoff to Rob Stringer to Kid Harpoon and Jeff Bhasker to Rob Sheffield to Alessandro Michele (and the occasional woman— hello Shirley Halperin and Anna Wintour).

Harry is marketed as a blank slate onto which to project the consumer’s fantasies.

In interviews, he says nothing, in a pseudo-philosophical way. Did he rep LGBT colors on his album cover? Did he not?

He likes men? He likes women? Did he fuck his way to a leading role? Did he break up a family with young kids to get said role? But he did it “with kindness,” so it’s okay. Right? Is drug use okay? It’s good when it’s Harry Styles, right? Is he transgender? If you buy his stuff, he’ll be anything you want him to be.

His team datamines and scours Spotify algorithms to construct viral songs for him, but the songs sound as unoriginal and inoffensive as one would expect, completely smooth and devoid of expression like Harry’s forehead.

His PR combs through the internet to suppress and delete negative news, 24/7/365, always working. Harry’s conservative and Zionist politics get scrubbed away and no one talks about it. But get him impromptu, and he says some truly dumb, unfortunate shit. Zarries honestly think Zayn would tolerate this man? Especially with a daughter who has Palestinian ancestry?

Harry winks and smirks and poses, but the bottomline is money speaks louder than any moral conviction he might have. His fans brag about him in these exact terms: he’s rich, he’s at the top of the charts, look at his numbers, he’s well-connected, he insults his bandmates and still thrives.

Harry has nurtured his fans. He made them what they are. They reflect each other. He cultivated this toxicity and let’s face it, Harry basks in it.

#harry styles #anna wintour #rob sheffield #kid harpoon #irving azoff #larries #zarries #harries

[louisisalarrie]

Hello! I was reading that master post you linked about Harry and Louis coming out in 2015 and it said:

“Doesn’t it make so much sense if this situation truly was like that - Zayn’s happiness and survival for Harry’s and vice versa? (because if you think Harry wasn’t also on the brink of being suicidal, go back and rewatch the Adore You music video. Listen to the songs he wrote. To the ones Louis wrote “Could have been a bed in a box” is pretty dark (and yes, I have heard him sing these lyrics live with my very own ears) - and Don’t Let It Break Your Heart sounds a lot better than Please Don’t Kill Yourself).”

Now I know this is a pretty heavy subject so it is hard to assume things and theorize about how Harry was truly feeling but do you agree with this take?

TW: mental health

Hey anon!! Apologies for not putting a TW on that post I shared, I forgot that bit was in there and it is extremely heavy stuff.

Look… all we can do is look at the situation and what the boys have said and make up our own minds. I don’t want to assume or try and psychoanalyse any of the boys’ mental health and diagnose them or try and understand what it could’ve been like in their head, but genuinely it would’ve been a rough time. We did see both louis and zayn struggling very very hard for a while there, however we didn’t see the extent of Liam’s addictions, or any kind of extremely obvious signs of bad mental health from Harry or niall too often. We knew they were exhausted, and strung out, and dealing with shit mgmt and that was obviously going to affect their mental and physical health overall, but we can’t know exactly what they were struggling with or thinking about at the time. Putting myself in their shoes though, I would’ve been using bad coping mechanisms and been pretty bad mental health wise.

Anyway, look… because I believe in this theory, I do agree it was Zayn’s happiness and health vs Harry’s freedom, and that’s why the fallout was so bad between them. And I think they all understand that it’s none of their faults, and it was just the circumstance they were in. And I’m sure now that they’re a bit older they can talk about this and empathise and understand each other more clearly. Louis said they’d talk about it when they were more mature, and his and Zayn’s falling out was 100% more than just the band/money. Louis is an extremely caring person and would’ve dropped everything to help zayn through that, and they all did help, but like that post said, it was “hold on a little bit longer” over and over again. And as much as louis loves that band, he’s not getting rid of such a deep friendship for someone who was struggling and clearly unwell and needed to leave. It was so much more than that. That’s why this theory is very believable.

I think they were all struggling with mental health, honestly. The happy go lucky puppy dog Harry baby though, hides it pretty well most of the time. He’s quite the showman. But the material caralara mentioned for their supporting argument does definitely hold some weight to it. I think it’s plausible Harry was that bad, but I don’t think we can compare any of their mental health to each other.

#anon #answered #tw mental health #tw suicide

[malleryanne]

*RANT WARNING*

ok this is going to trigger the fuck out of a lot of people probably but I don't give a single damn because I've been stewing over a stupid comment and I need to rant. I hate when toxic directioners just hop straight onto the hate train with absolutely no hesitation (like the whole Zayn & yolanda situation and the podcast thing with Liam that got him way more hate than anyone deserves) and then as soon as the drama is over and people have calmed their asses the directioners that were hating on a member come back and start staning them again acting all sorry and apologizing. if you guys are going to constantly be switching sides but not sticking up for your "idol" when it actually counts, they don't need you as a fan. cancel culture is toxic as fuck because people make monsters out of someone who just made a mistake, like human beings do. this isn't even the worst part though because what makes me really fucking angry is when the toxic directioners generalize the whole fandom and act like what they did was ok because "all directioners" did it. the comment I saw the other day was on a sad Liam edit with him talking about how the hate affected him and a "directioner" said that we (the fandom) made Liam feel like that. I was like, bitch? who the fuck is "we". just because your fake ass just decided to go along with everyone's toxic and hateful opinions about Liam doesn't mean that all directioners did. I personally have never stopped supporting any member throughout any type of drama and I have never made anything even close to hate comment towards one of the members because unlike you I'm actually a fucking real supporter and a decent human being. plus I saw countless of other directioners sticking up for Liam during the hate situation, so no, the directioners didn't do that to him because the people that hated on him honestly don't even deserve to be called a directioner. don't group us real ones in with you please when you talk about that. sure if you guys are sorry for what you did to him, that's wonderful, but honestly if you truly, truly cared about him, you wouldn't have done it in the first place. and before anyone that still is hating on Liam for some stupid fucking reason says he deserved it, no, he didn't. he made a mistake, said things he didn't mean, partly because the people who he was with knew what they were doing. the other members don't have harsh feelings towards him so why should you? he apologized afterwards to Zayn and some time ago Zayn actually commented on one of Liam's insta posts calling him his brother. Louis also stuck up for Liam during this as well. again, for the people that hated on him and are sorry now, I'm glad your sorry, and I understand that sometimes it's easy to just believe everything people say, but next time you should really try to understand the whole situation and view the person as a human rather than a celebrity before you just start attacking them. this rant is mostly about the Liam situation, but that's because this is my best example but I did see similar things with Zayn after the whole ab*se accusations. if you guys are going to love your idol and hate them the next, I repeat, they don't need you as a fan. also don't generalize an entire fandom so you can make an excuse for your actions.

i know I probably offended a lot of people but at least I'm not stewing in my head anymore lol.

also let's be clear, when I say stop cancel culture, Im not saying to forgive people who do stuff that's actually deserving of criticism such as being racist, ect.

#liam payne #zayn malik #one direction #directioners #stop cancel culture

[fakeoutbf]

hellooo ✨

oof the image you've put of stick seasons in my mind, i NEED to go on a roadtrip immediately 👀 i'm gonna listen to the other albums you mentioned over the break and promptly rot and get into too many feelings. at least i'll have hot chocolate 🤍

like i know we got new music from louis recently, but i'm so excited for niall's music because like that man never goes wrong with his songs and both albums are 10/10 and i will die on the hill that heartbreak weather deserved a live tour! ooh i love all their solo music except for liam 💀 sorry but it's just not my vibe. i enjoy zayn's music a lot and i just love how he drops an album and disappears and does weird shit throughout the year like that's what i aspire to be

italy really is a dream place isn't it 🥹 i think the reason scotland has my heart is because of how quiet and isolated it seems (to me not to everyone) it's seems like a good place to runaway to gather your thoughts and just give time to yourself. i grew up in metropolitan cities and all my life i've been in places that are always constantly running and rushing and so scotland appeals to me a lot 🫣

your answer about love 🥹🫶 i'm gonna sob 🫣

i think love to me is something my grandma taught to me that i'll keep with me forever : love is in the little things and the soft rememberings and the tiny gestures and i'm someone who will always cherish platonic love over romantic love so love is friendship 🤍

if you could experience any time period in the history of things, which one would you go back to? 👀

hi hi 🫶🏻

listening to noah kahan while on break with hot chocolate sounds like a dream! please let me know which end up being your faves 💗

i’m the exact same! i listen to all their solo stuff but i only really liked a couple from liam and i think i only heard his album once through. and ngl i’m kinda glad niall canceled the hbw tour bc i wasn’t gonna get tickets but now i’m 100% going to his next tour bc all the music he releases is incredible. i still have songs from hbw in my top 100 and will probably keep having them until the new album comes out. and i love zayn’s music and new artist ventures so much as well. i would also love to just live my life, drop an album or merch out of nowhere and then chill. while we’re at it, favorite zayn and niall songs?

oh i get that! i’d definitely agree that living somewhere smaller might be more peaceful. i’m from a small city and i don’t feel like it’s fast paced by any means, but i hate how poorly planned the city is. totally inaccessible to pedestrians and the public transport sucks. i had to go to a bigger city for my harry show a couple of weeks ago and the amount of traffic was absolutely repulsive ajenrnsk as well as having to rush everywhere rip idk i think scotland might be much better in that aspect 🫣

i agree so much with your grandma, love truly is about the little things. and i love that you turn to platonic love over romantic love! i’m more of a familial love type person, at least with my mom and grandparents from her side. they’re unconditional support always and i truly don’t know who or where i’d be with them ❤️‍🩹

i’d love to go back to france at the end of the 19th century, just when impressionism was coming up. ngl i’m a bit of an art nerd so it would probably be that or 15/16th century italy for the renaissance period. but there’s just something about impressionist paintings (think monet, renoir, morisot, degas) that just makes me wanna live the scenes painted in the flesh. what about you? when would you go?

i hope you had a nice day today, sending you lots of love 💖💕💓💗💞💝

#btw i loooove your choice of deep questions #i put in the first answer i thought of but then i also kept thinking of like the 70s in the us or uk for fashion/music purposes #and now i’m torn lmaoooo #answered #holiday pals #s 💌

[imthebadguyyy]

That's Our Baby ! 

Y/N L/N is the sixth member of One Direction, the biggest band in the world. When one of her best friends announces he's leaving, how do they cope? 

-------------------------------------------------------

Sat in the studio, Louis and Y/N fiddled around with the guitars and drums present in the little room. They had been given the task of songwriting for their 5th album, and had gone on their songwriting getaway to the Maldives, along with Liam. They had been accompanied by other songwriters as well as producers.Niall and Harry had decided to stay back and join the songwriting trip later. So while they remained in LA, relaxing, the other three decided to get a head start on the writing. 

"Hey Lou, what about "how many nights did it take to count the stars, that's the time it would take to fix my heart?" 

" I like that. Maybe after that for like a chorus bit we could have something like, " if I tried, I know it would feel like infinity?" 

"Yeah ! Like we can work on that a little more, but if we work with this, we can make a song out of it" 

" We'll have to tell Liam too, he was so upset when we wrote Never Enough without him" 

Laughing, the two walked into the kitchen of their rented villa, were Liam was sat with Patrick, one of their producers and lyricists. The villa was a beautiful one, with a view of the sea and the beach, and was the perfect place to come to make music. Y/N had picked it out, claiming that only a beach and sea air would really help them right truly outstanding music because "it's what our fans deserve Li!" 

And so far, they had written nearly 5 songs, all finished during the early hours of the morning, as they videocalled the other two to let them know of their progress. It had been about 2 weeks since Zayn had announced that he was leaving the band, and even though they supported him publicly, secretly, Y/N was hurt. But she did a marvelous job of hiding it. In fact, she had suggested the holiday so that she could take time to cope with it herself. Harry and Niall were supposed to arrive the next day, when they would start recording the album in their little studio. 

Having spaced out of the conversation in the kitchen, she jumped when she heard her name being called, and Liam looking at her with a concerned look in his eyes. " you alright babe ?" 

"Yeah I'm fine, just really hungry" 

Patrick chimed in saying "there's a great kebab place here, that has the best cocktails you could ever have with the most succulent kebabs too. And you have to try their mango chutney"

"That sounds great! Let's go then" Louis said, feeling his tummy growl as well. 

"Wait I need to comb my hair and change my clothes !" Y/N exclaimed, running up to her room. She brushed out her wavy/curly/straight hair and pulled on a pretty newspaper print top and denim shorts. She put her sunglasses, phone, wallet and mini sunscreen in her bag, and pulled on her brown strapped sandals. 

Running down, she stopped to look in the mirror, and joined the other 3 at the door. Julian, their other producer, was waiting as well, and smiled upon seeing her make her way to the door. "Come on Y/N ! We're all really hungry"

"Yeah yeah I'm coming. All this doesn't happen magically you know" she said, waving a hand around her face. 

Laughing the group of 5 made their way to the Kebab shop, and enjoyed their fabulous meal of kebabs, rotis, and cocktails. 

Halfway through their meal, Y/N heard her phone blow up with notifications. Slightly surprised, she pulled it out of her purse. 

Opening it, the first thing she saw was 789 notifications fron Twitter, 345 from Instagram, and her WhatsApp blowing up. Slightly shocked she opened Twitter, to be met with the headline, "ZAYN MALIK'S TELL ALL INTERVIEW - THE FORMER BAND MEMBER OF ONE DIRECTION SPILLS THE BEANS ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCE IN THE BAND" 

The first paragraph talked about how he didn't like the music they were making.

The second about how he didn't feel included.

The third about how he was never happy. 

The fourth about how he struggled with anxiety. 

Suddenly overwhelmed, Y/N couldn't breathe. Her chest was contracting and her eyes were burning. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe. Her mind was running too fast and an overwhelming sense of panic and fear was running through her heart. Louis, turning to look at her noticed how she was starting to shake. 

Startled, he wrapped an arm around her and gently pushed her hair out of her face. 

" you alright love ?"

Liam turned to look at her too, concern visible in his brown eyes. 

"N/N you're shaking! What happened?!" He asked instantly moving over to give her a hug. Tears began to roll down her cheeks as her vision blurred completely and she tightened her arms around Liams chest as Louis gently played with her hair. 

"Zayn said he wasn't happy! He said that he didn't like the music we made together" 

Exchanging a look, Louis sighed and gently pulled her closer to him. "He didn't mean that babe. I promise he's alright" 

"NO lou, he isn't alright. If he was okay and happy, he wouldn't have left. He would still be here. I know I sound selfish, but I thought we were supposed to be together as BAND for a long time. And we were supposed to be friends forever. Now you don't even talk to him, and he doesn't want anything to do with us. If you think that alright, then fine. But I don't think it is" she said, voice breaking as she turned to look at Louis with watery eyes. Patrick and Julian quietly sat there, unsure of how to deal with the situation. They understood why the girl was upset. She had been incredibly close to Zayn, and he had considered her a younger sister. When he had left, Y/N had curled up into her little shell even more, and had lost some of her happy go lucky, bubbly personality. They all felt it. 

"Alright, I think we should go home now. It's nearly midnight anyway. Let's get some sleep and we can talk this over with Harry and Niall tomorrow. But you need your sleep darling. Come on let's go" Liam said, helping her get to her feet and wrapping an arm around her waist while Louis paid the bill. They made their way home and Y/N crashed onto her bed, tired out from the crying. 

-------------------------------------------------------

"You're telling me that she had an anxiety attack and cried because of that interview ?" Niall asked, shock written over all his features. His blue eyes had crinkled with worry when he had heard about Y/N's breakdown from Louis and Liam, and his heart had gone out for the baby of the group. 

Harry had remained silent, unsure of how to respond. He absolutely adored Y/N, and the thought of her crying made him sick to his stomach. 

"Yes Niall. She cried and sobbed and said that we were supposed to stick together and all that. It was quite painful to watch really" Louis responded, still slightly shaken by Y/N's breakdown. Liam nodded eyes flickering up to the staircase as he heard her door open. 

Awoken from her sleep, Y/N made her way down, rubbing her eyes, perking up instantly when she heard Harry and Niall's voices in the kitchen. Walking down she saw the boys, Liam standing near the sink with a cup of coffee in hand, Niall sitting at the table with a plate in front of him, Harry standing near the fridge with a slight frown on his face, long hair in a bun and Louis standing in front of the stove , frying some eggs. When she walked into the kitchen, she was instantly engulfed in hug by Harry, his long lanky figure wrapping around her shorter one. "You okay darling?" He asked, green eyes crinkled with worry. 

"Yeah I'm alright I guess" she responded leaning into the hug. Pulling away, she went to hug Niall, engulfed once again a different hug, a small whine coming from Harry as she turned. Giggling she turned to him and said, " do you wanna cuddle ?" 

"Yes !" The long haired man exclaimed, running up the stairs to go to her bedroom. Wrapping her hands around Niall and Liam's, she motioned to Louis to come and join them as well. 

"Group cuddles!" She cheered as she led them up the stairs. Harry had already laid down on her bed, arms held out to the woman. She giggled and climbed onto the bed too, letting him wrap his arms around her waist. Niall was the next to join, moving closer to her tummy, as he rested his head on her belly and wrapped his arms around her legs. Louis moved to her other shoulder, resting his head on top of hers as he played with her long locks. Liam shuffled to the spot near Harry's legs, resting his head on her right thigh, and wrapping his arms around her legs as well. 

All smushed together on the bed, they laughed and giggled for a while, as Y/N played with Niall and Liam's hair, and Harry traced figures on her collarbone and arms. Louis played with her hair, lulling her into a soft sleep. And as they all dozed off, Niall lifted his head to whisper one final sentence before they fell asleep. " that's Our Baby" 

_______________________________

END.

This fic was longer than I expected.

Hope you liked it! 

#harry styles x reader #niall horan x reader #liam payne x reader #louis tomlinson x reader #one direction #harry styles #niall horan #liam payne #louis tomlinson #zayn malik #Y/N #one direction fanfiction #one d imagines #one direction imagines #imthebadguyyyfics

[1ddiscourseoftheday]

Mon 7 June ‘21

Liam’s podcast with Steve Bartlett is out and while I still don’t care about that guy I’ll give him this-- he does great at getting out of the way and letting Liam talk. And boy does Liam talk! Liam says A LOT and let’s all just pause to send him some big hugs before we get into right? And then look to the future- Liam’s routine is to say ‘things have been terrible but it’s fine, it’s fine NOW’, always, even when that is absolutely obviously not true, and today is no different but for once I actually believe some of his hopeful bits too which is so great! I hope things really are shifting for him and I can’t wait to hear this new song of his. But there’s a lot that’s hard to hear too, oh Liam. He said that he and Maya have broken up (so yes, presumably why he just moved again such a short time after they moved into their haunted house), talked about his struggles with his alcoholism (and said he’s been sober for a month right now, go babe!), shared the usual distressing stories about his time in the band and what that was like for him (and how it still impacts him), and he talked about his new song and how it feels different for him than his past solo music. Truly though there is SO MUCH more than I can get into here or then you can get from the UA highlights- I HIGHLY recommend actually watching at least parts of the video, also because the attempt to summarize so much erases all the charm and humor, of which there is much. If you don’t think you want to watch Liam’s interviews, it has to be because you aren’t watching Liam’s interviews, they’re delightful! Plus really if you care about 1D and want information about what it was like for any of them, listen to Liam, he’s the one who’s out there talking about it.

About Maya he said, that yes, he is now single, and “I’ve just been not been very good at relationships,” and “I’m a proper perfectionist… at the start of the relationship you put out this complete false character like I might as well go in in costume, I’m like putting out something that is not there... kind of like encompassing someone else’s life with your crap rather than just doing your thing and laying out your store from day one. That’s my biggest problem is that I feel like I don’t lay out my store... and then I’m annoyed when they don’t like what I like,” and “I think my problem is I struggle to be on my own sometimes... I dive in and out of relationships too quickly. I’ve not spent enough time on my own to relearn about myself.”

He laughs about his tendency to ask his manager things during interviews; “My fans think that Steve is doing something to me, they’re like liberty for Liam because he always looks to Steve, but that’s because I like him. It’s not because he’s harming me as a person. There’s like a hashtag Liberty for Liam because they think I’m some like prison child,” and he also said “my manager’s my best friend,” (and he’s said in the past he is a big support for him) and mentioned stuff they’d talked about recently around his therapeutic awakenings.

He talked about therapy being something you have to want to do and be ready to do rather than being pushed into, like getting sober, and says that this time around with his own therapy work he’s really felt that and thrown himself into it and he talked a lot about his relationship to therapy in connection with band days. “I mean one of our old managers went to therapy from being a manager of One Direction. So if you can imagine how that feels like the rest of us definitely need some.”

“We were young,” he said, “What I found was I didn’t know I was the boss until like a few months ago, I still don’t even feel like I am now, like I’m such a child. And everyone I work with now is older than me and wiser than me and I’m like what the hell am I doing here with these people. When we were 17 I thought the security guard was like in charge of me so I was like Can we leave the room? No? Oh ok then,” and “when we were in the band, the best way to secure us was just lock us in our rooms. And of course what’s in the room? Minibar. So at a certain point, I thought Well I’m gonna have a party for one and that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life... You know I spoke to somebody about this in child development as a teen, the one thing you need is freedom to make choices. That we could do anything we wanted it seemed from the outside but we were always locked in a room at night and then it would be car, hotel room, stage, sing, locked. So it’s like they pulled the dust cloth off, let us out for a minute, but then it’s back underneath again,” and “the day the band ended I was like thank the lord for that. And I know a lot of people are going to be mad with me for saying that, but I needed it to stop. It would kill me.” Anyway, he said, because it wouldn’t be Liam without an upbeat coda, “I don’t want any of this to get lost in translation. I’m not 100% moaning about my life... it’s had its ups and its downs, but I would rather talk about it and it’s therapeutic for me.”

And what about that exciting new song? Liam said, “We have a really cool song in the pipeline... one of the first ones I’ve actually written myself- with some other people, I didn’t write it by myself, but it’s the first one I’ve really liked. And I think I got so used used carting around other peoples songs and not embedding myself creatively in what I do because I was so scared to find out who I was,” and “I don’t really know how I would tour again. I really want to” [on discord today he said he would be touring next year] “I always said throughout my solo career I’d let my song book speak to me. And I don’t think my song book spoke to me to get off my ass. I only became a solo artist because I had Strip That Down. I wasn’t gonna do it, I was gonna leave it alone. I was like, I survived it once thank you very much- but I’m back in now. Because the song, I knew it was right. It felt right with that song, I hadn’t had that. This year, the song we have I feel really really great about. So I’d rather let the music do the talking than me come out and force it. We don’t need any more useless music in the world, it needs to mean something,” and he mentioned the new song on the discord a lot too, most notably picking out a long comment that thanked him for making the fan feel supported and safe and for “putting your heart in everything you do” and for his support of the LGBTQ community to respond to with, “I think you will really like the new song.”

A few other random bits, he said that he thinks there should be a system to make therapy available to musicians in the industry, “I think I’m definitely gonna get a dog because I need routine,” and “I recently started jujitsu,” yeah you and everyone else huh, so do him and Louis and Oli go to the same gym or ???, and he acknowledged that as an addict he may have just transferred that to working out “but there’s a lot worse things to be addicted to then looking after yourself” hmm but he does seem to say that he’s doing better around body image stuff; he talks about having put on weight during lockdown and seeing himself in the BAFTAS performance- “I saw myself... and I was like ‘oh my god I’ve completely let myself go in this’. And it was fine...I feel so much more secure in myself now.” Oh and that he’s written a comedic movie script “based around AA” and his experiences there, such as how “I had a really weird AA experience the first time that I went. My first experience was with Russell Brand.” LMAO yes! Cannot wait, bring on auteur Liam please! Anyway as if ALL THAT wasn’t enough he’s also dove into the lead up to his NFT release; he said “I'm almost ready to share my NFTs with you guys... Who wants to see them?” and posted a tiny preview that tells us its (their?) title for the first time- Lonely Bug.

Niall and Anne Marie perform on Jimmy Fallon tonight, and the hype is already a go! I guess it’s prerecorded, as we’re already seeing pictures from it; they’re singing to each other with the cute car from the video in the background. Niall signed on to a letter to Boris Johnson asking for changes to music streaming revenue rules and signed by 232 artists (including all the artists Johnson recently named as his favorites, haha). Zayn signed on to a Billboard petition to the US senate calling for gun safety laws. The bar Zayn got into the fight in front of posted “Zayn's a regular at Amsterdam Billiards and he is a true gentleman. On Thursday night he was confronted by an inebriated passer-by outside on the street and was called a homophobic slur. We support Zayn & condemn homophobia in the strongest terms!” And also PS omg again because it just isn’t going away: Harry’s beauty company is called Pleased As, his name is Harry Edward Styles so yes when listed last name first, as legal documents do, it spells SHE but it is not a “feminist abbreviation” (WHAT? even??) nor the name of the business.

#liam payne #long post #so long #the longest #ugh #yeah I think he’s mentioned the movie before but it’s amazing every time #Liam also talked about the concept of toxic productivity and feeling like you have to be doing things always to be valid #OMG YES PLEASE I want all of them to be talking about that #I notice no one’s circulating that bit where he calls out the fans’ idea that he’s a victim of his manager #I... won’t say it I guess but like… do consider listening to what they actually tell us about themselves occasionally though #rather than just fans online #the industry is fucked but also they're not children #anymore #and have all at this point managed to find people they trust as their closest associates #anyway did I or did I not just say that Liam and Maya had broken up I DID so why was she on insta saying they were still together hmmm? Lies #but the real point is that I was right lol #if you messaged me to ask about the SHE thing it’s not that I’m targeting you it’s that you were one of MANY #it’s really true debunk info just doesn’t get the traction that nonsense posts do #pleased as #should have made that a tag already oops #7 jun 21 #I hope you guys are grateful I have so much time on my hands this took forever #tw alcohol #tw substance abuse #tw alcoholism #maya henry #laya

[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!”

[1ddotdhq]

👁 Sun 01 Nov ‘20 🍼

After yesterday’s amazing show (the timey wimey of which was even more wibbly wobbly than we thought- it was only an hour late in SOME markets, there was just a big confusing daylight savings time fail in the announcements), today Liam’s Halloween merch is making quite a splash! There's a mask with his name in a spooky gothic font with classic flash tattoo style doodles, including swallows, a microphone, an eye, several skulls, a weird tongue looking thing, and some lyrics! His T-shirt design is also Halloween themed (or, like - Dia de los Muertos themed, which is different) and has a large skull covered in purple and yellow roses (and patterns), his name, another eye, cobwebs, lightning bolts, and some more swallows. There are indeed designs on the merch that match up with many of Zayn's tattoos but honestly that line art eye looks as much like MY eye as it does Zayn's. I feel like a comparison to Zayn's eye TATTOO would have been more convincing, but that wasn't the conjecture! Meanwhile Zayn and all six of his eyes (tattooed, real, and glasses) were seen again! Twice in ONE DAY, truly a holiday! Late in the day yesterday we got one last treat (or trick, depending on your perspective) from Gigi: a family zelfie of her, Zayn and zaby X in their family-of-geeks costume...oh wait no that's their actual identities! Their costumes were Gigi as not just a videogame character but a specific variant suit (Zero Suit Samus? I guess? *shrugs as if I know what I'm talking about*), and Zayn in his full Slytherin uniform including a jumper and thick glasses he'd left out of his earlier post, smiling down at the zaby in his arms (tiny hulk!! uwu) with a soft happy face. You'd think this would generate discourse, and it has, but mostly people are busy arguing about whether Z is a Slytherin! Messing with peoples' sorting headcanons is no joke, it's an even more surefire way to get the fandom fired up than babies and girlfriends.

A receipt has circulated wildly from an Kuwaiti man who describes an encounter with Louis from Vegas in like 2016 or '17 it seems like. He says Louis walked up to him randomly, touched him and complimented his beard (lol), and then walked away again. A few days later they ran into each other again and Louis (and Oli!) passed by him and - yup! Louis touched his shoulder, complimented him again, and asked if the man remembered him. The guy was like, ‘uh, yeah dude, it's been like a day,’ and then Louis disappeared into the party once more like the vision he is. Our hero was then like, ‘who WAS that man’, googled him, and figured out that yes, he'd been hit on TWICE by an international superstar. In my head, I imagine Louis flitting around being very charming, capturing people’s attention, then leaving just as quickly as he came, leaving Oli standing there smiling awkwardly. Anyway in slightly more professional Louis news:  Lyric Drop 2 has been pulled from Louis’ merch store (that was REALLY limited edition, huh?). This means the next single for release is We Made It, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed for rainbows! An A&R Sony manager (Micheala Lundin, who previously worked on Louis’ team at Syco) celebrated Two Of Us’ milestone - it reached 100 million streams on Spotify! Her instagram story tags the people involved with the making of the song and says, “This little baby reached 100 million! 🌟...Will always be a special one! Pop perfection by my favorite legends”. Same, though it always makes me cry! And, in other Louis things that make me cry, Reverse Rett (a charity that works to improve the lives of those touched by Rett syndrome) - which  Louis donated thousands of pounds through an art fundraiser in 2016 - has revealed that he has quietly been supporting them by donating auction prizes ever since. I have a lot of feelings about this, and I’m always floored by his consistent and continued kindness, though I definitely shouldn’t be at this point. 

Drip, drip drip it goes - the news, I mean, but I can see why you might think it would be milk! GQ posted a Golden picture of Harry on instagram (from the video, but also a good description of the picture itself), and the comments are really something else! “Didn’t know my dude was a C cup,” said one guy. “Is my dude lactating,” asked another one. And the band Cannon announced that they would start their “Covers by Cannon” series with a cover of Golden, and Harry, apparently lurking around insta, liked the post: I hope this means he's seeing the GQ comments too cause that's the real entertainment of the day! And finally, Instagram Issues Curse strikes again: “did Niall just post something on ig and deleted it?” and to which Niall - always creeping around in his mentions - replied, “Yeh I think so...I can’t see it on my story”. Well, neither can I, so I can’t tell you what it was (:/), but I’m gonna be keeping a closer eye on his insta in the week leading up to the show! 

#liam payne #zayn #louis tomlinson #Harry Styles #Niall Horan #wow look at me with the ot5 content today #damn #i have nothing else to add except im so in love with louis #not even funny #also that today was a collaborative efforts and if you ever see a really witty oneliner it was probably discourse's idea hahaha #anyways! #song of the day! #i have two! #the first is Like a Movie by Cam (no im not over this album) #and the second is To Die For by Sam Smith #and they're both written by Sam Smith! #like woahhhhhh what a talented individual #the original post called the man Egyptian but he is not #he is from Kuwait #I should have done my due diligence and I apologize #it’s been fixed in the post!

[coolnerdyandalone]

on FIMQ deleting her content and COVID-19 (and a gratuitous larry fic rec)

@freddiesmyqueen first of all queen i hope you’re doing ok although i know some shit must have gone down for you to delete/private list all your videos and i hope you know that the larry community supports you always. Also your talent is TRULY unmatched in the world of video editing - no one makes edits quite like you and that’s why your loss impacts the community so profoundly. 

secondly, i know at least i was hoping to turn to rewatching all of FIMQ’s videos while i’m being quarantined due to the coronavirus. and i’m willing to bet that i’m not the only one. this is a scary time and for people like me who feel profoundly alone right now, the only way for me to calm my nerves and fears is by reverting to the content and community that helped me feel not so alone when i was in middle and high school. For me, that looks like watching FIMQ videos and reading my favorite larry fanfics (which i will also link below).  because of this i thought it might be helpful to repost some links that were posted by @bluemoonlarryandkaylor for a signal boost (if my teeny-tiny account can be called a signal boost). 

link to a google drive with FIMQ videos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ONwfLOd_IYvAL5OUDqDb_LLgQsDpd9il

link to an acct with some FIMQ re-uploads: https://www.youtube.com/user/Joana3961/videos

link to FIMQ vids with spanish subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIouodFhArMkQhOHxv2t2NgxTwl6KvXAT

and now if you want to look at some good old fashioned larry fics that are my ABSOLUTE faves and could 100% be actual novels/movies, keep reading:

And Then A Bit** by @infinitelymint aka the best fanfic ever written (basically larry fakes a relationship for publicity with each other and it could be cannon if you really wanted to hope upon hopes): https://archiveofourown.org/works/1415272/chapters/2972746 (159k)

“We’d like to give the fans what they want.” Magee states, placing his hand on the table in front of him and leaning forward. “We want to give them Larry Stylinson.”

Or, take a parallel universe where Louis and Harry were never together, mix in a two year hiatus and an impending comeback, pour in a dash of lost fans, two tablespoons of strong friendship and a Modest! employee with a good idea. Add a squeeze of pretending to be a couple, lots of kisses and a tattoo or two. Stir. Serve: the mother of all publicity stunts.

(aka Harry and Louis fake a relationship for publicity. Eventually it becomes a lot less fake and a lot more real.)

Escapade** by @haydolce aka the Jack McQueen fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4034197/chapters/9071932 (146k)

In the grand scheme of things, finding a date for a wedding should be no problem for Louis Tomlinson. He's rich. He's handsome. He's reasonably well behaved. But when the wedding is for his lifelong best friend (and former boyfriend), and is happening in under a month, finding a date for the ceremony and accompanying festivities becomes more of an adventure than he ever could have planned for.

California Sold** by @isthatyoularry​ : https://archiveofourown.org/works/5157680/chapters/11877494 (123k)

Notoriously closeted boyband member Harry Styles is famous on a global scale, meanwhile Louis, as his best friend, is back home in Manchester, living the typical life of a 24 year old. When Harry needs Louis with him in LA, a publicity stunt gone wrong changes their friendship forever.

A fake-relationship AU between two lifelong best friends.

Bring Your Body Baby (I Could Bring You Fame) by @theboyfriendstagram : https://archiveofourown.org/works/4263903/chapters/9652944 (84k)

Eighteen year old Harry Styles just graduated high school and landed a summer job as a waterboy for his favorite football team. His job description is simple: be ready to hand water and towels to players if needed. That didn’t seem to include Louis Tomlinson though, a twenty-three year old, recently transferred Paris Saint-German player, who seems to like making Harry’s job much more difficult than it has to be.

OR  

A self-indulgent AU that takes place over the summer of 2015. 18 year old Harry hates pining after people he can't have, and 23 year old footballer Louis loves flirting with people even though it never means anything.

Pull Me Under** by @zarah5 : https://archiveofourown.org/works/870766/chapters/1672104 (140k)

AU. As the first British footballer to come out at the prime of his career, it helps that Louis Tomlinson is in a long-term, committed relationship. Even if that relationship is fake. (Featuring Niall as Louis' favourite teammate, Liam as Louis' agent, and Zayn as Liam's boyfriend, who just happens to be good friends with one Harry Styles.) 

You You You** by @isthatyoularry : https://archiveofourown.org/works/846690/chapters/1617212 (137k)

“Infamous boybander leaves club together with unknown,” read the headline. Underneath were pictures of a boy with dark curls, green eyes and very tight pants. They both studied the article for a moment, reading it through quickly. “Is that…?” Louis frowned. That guy almost looked exactly like... "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!" "Louis," Niall said, looking absolutely fucked over. "You just fucked the most wanted guy on earth. You just fucked Harry Styles of One Direction."

Or, the one where Harry and Louis meet at a club and Louis takes Harry home, only for him to realize that the boy who just made him breakfast half naked is Harry Styles from One Direction.

Like an Endless Summer by @horsegirlharry : https://archiveofourown.org/works/11365494/chapters/25442085 (87k)

“You just wanna go fawn over Styles as soon as possible,” Zayn grumbles.

“I do not. Plus, he probably got ugly this year. Eighteen is an awkward time...I bet he’s got acne and one of those terrible fuckboy haircuts all the hipsters are getting these days, with the shaved sides? Just watch, the first year we’re gonna get any time together is gonna be the first year I don’t have a stupid crush on him.”

---

Or, Louis is a riding instructor at a summer camp, and Harry is a fellow counselor who he’s been successfully managing his crush on for the last two summers. That is, until Harry shows up this year leveled up and lethal, and all Louis’s formerly perfected veneer of nonchalance melts like a popsicle in the sun.

Three French Hems by @100percentsassy and @gloriaandrews : https://archiveofourown.org/works/3064493 (20k)

In which Louis is a designer at Burberry and Harry spends December wearing Lanvin… and Lanvin… and Lanvin.

The Dead of July aka the Marvel Fic by @whimsicule  : https://archiveofourown.org/works/3594570/chapters/7928520 (117k)

Being an Avenger means continuing to be Captain America and smiling and being honorable for the public and Harry does his best. But it doesn’t give him time to figure out who he is supposed to be once he takes off his uniform and puts the shield to the side. Just being Harry had always involved Louis, and Harry fears he doesn’t know how to exist without him.

or: Harry is Captain America, and Louis’ been dead for 70 years.

Gods & Monsters by  @mizzwilde : https://archiveofourown.org/works/2090982/chapters/4550871 (201k)

The instructions were simple: seduce and destroy Harry Styles. Not once did they discuss the option of Louis actually falling in love. So, naturally, that's exactly what he did.

Love is a Rebellious Bird aka LIARB aka the orchestra fic aka dont hum bolero by @100percentsassy and @gloriaandrews : https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162438/chapters/2362331 (135k)

AU in which the boys still make music. Louis is the concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra, Harry is the New! and Exciting! interim conductor/ex-cello prodigy who "has made Mozart cool again" according to Esquire Magazine (Louis hates him immediately, which is definitely why he internet stalked him in his dark bedroom late at night that one time), and Niall is the best. Zayn and Liam are around too.

Don't hum Bolero.

My English Love Affair** by @isthatyoularry​ : https://archiveofourown.org/works/1873962 (19k)

The thing about sleeping with a member of a famous indie band is that the inevitability of having a song written about you is most likely a hundred percent. The second thing is that in the end, nobody's supposed to find out it's about you.

The one where Harry writes a song about his English love affair and Louis sleeps with someone in White Eskimo and all he gets is a stupid song written about him.

Soft Hands, Fast Feet, Can’t Lose by @haydolce : https://archiveofourown.org/works/5799241/chapters/13366498 (113k)

American Uni AU. Harry Styles is a frat boy football star from the wealthy Styles Family athletic dynasty. A celebrity among football fans, he knows how to play, he knows how to party, and he knows how to fuck (all of which is well known among his legion of admirers).

Louis Tomlinson is a student and an athlete, but his similarities to Harry end there. Intelligent, focused, independent, and completely uninterested in Harry’s charms, Louis is an anomaly in a world ruled by football.

A bet about the pair, who might be more similar than they originally thought, brings them together. Shakespeare, ballet, Disney, football, library chats, running, accidental spooning, Daredevil and Domino’s Pizza all blend into one big friendship Frappucino, but who will win in the end?

Wild and Unruly aka the Cowboy fic by @100percentsassy and @gloriaandrews : https://archiveofourown.org/works/2723093/chapters/6099611 (124k)

Harry is a cowboy sitting on the biggest oil reservoir in Wyoming, and Louis is the paralegal assigned to pressure him into selling his land.

For As Long As I Can Remember (It’s Been December)** by @greenfeelings​ : https://archiveofourown.org/works/15051122/chapters/34892210 (128k)

After recovering from a severe accident that causes Harry to lose his memory of three years, he moves to London to start his life over as a star chef. Little does he know that when he falls in love with Louis at first sight, it’s not the first time they meet.

Featuring an unintentional game of hot and cold, Harry chasing memories that won’t come back, Louis burying himself in work to try and forget what he can’t forget, Liam being torn between two of his best friends, Zayn as a moral compass and Niall saving the day with good music and brutal honesty.

the boys of fall** aka the american football fic by @godgavemelou​ : https://archiveofourown.org/works/5443037 (21k)

“And everyone, this is Harry Styles. He’s going to be our starting quarterback this year.”

Louis looks at him, the tall and lanky Harry Styles, and takes it all in. He’s got hair to his shoulders that curls at the ends, tattoos all down his arms, and a bright smile on his face as the team cheers him on. He’s lean and fit, and absolutely beautiful, and Louis hates him to the core.

OR an american football au where the boys play for the university of tennessee, and harry and louis quite hate each other.

** indicates that the fic is a log-in required fic, but if you want the pdf i can send it to you

#FIMQ #freddieismyqueen #freddiesmyqueen #larry #Larry Stylinson #larry proof #LARRY IS REAL #Larry theory #covid2019 #covid_19 #coronavirus #quarantine #loneliness #alone #not alone #community #larry community #larry videos #larry fic #larry fanfiction #larry fanfic rec #larry fic rec #fic rec

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

If I talk about the solo careers of former 1D members, for me my enjoyment of the music goes 1. Louis, 2. Zayn, 3. Niall, 4. and 5. are kind of interchangeable for me, except Liam is much less unlikeable than Harry. I think I only really love one song of Liam’s, and that has nothing to do with his talent, Liam has a very very good voice and his vocals are impressive, his songs and lyrics just don’t appeal to me. I have liked a couple of Harry’s songs from the first two albums (not WS, I really never liked that song or the mv), none from hs3 which is why I finally just said eh, his music doesn’t appeal to me anymore at all and I was already unimpressed by the rollout of his solo career. And it’s more that I liked some of Niall’s songs and I wanted him to do well because he was nice about Louis (and sadly enough is the only one who acknowledges Louis in any kind of positive way) and he hadn’t not gone to Louis’ show yet and I had good feelings towards all of the ex-members. Louis and Zayn were the ones I actually cared about and even loved, and their solo careers are the ones I truly support

Isn’t it funny how we loved all of them in 2016.

They really showed their true colors.

[sunflowerim]

I LOVE YOU 3000!

-PART 48

After Harry, Niall and Taylor arrived at LAX, they stopped for a little to take pictures with the excited fans who'd spotted them on the airport. The management had arranged for their transport to the hotel and soon enough, they were fetched by cars sent by their teams.

Louis arrived a few hours later, with Zayn and Liam. He was among the set of hosts for the red carpet of Academy Awards as was Niall, Zayn had an invitation from both Harry and Taylor's teams, having designed both their outfits for the evening and the movie for which Liam was the music producer was nominated. They were greeted by enthusiastic fans too but managed to get out of the airport quickly.

And thankfully for everyone, Harry and Louis were staying at different places.

93rd Academy Awards

Situated at the heart of Hollywood, the red carpet is a very intricate program. The 500 feet long red carpet was adorned with artists, photographers and interviewers. Bleachers had been set up on one side of it which contained hundreds of enthusiastic fans who'd come across from different countries to have a glimpse of the glam event.

Stepping out of the limousine with Taylor, Harry tried ro calm his frantic heartbeats. It would be unwise to lose his cool in front of hundred cameras and so many highly esteemed artists and a certain someone.

He was clad in a striped red and dark blue suit and beside him, Taylor in a gorgeous body con dress. Zayn knew perfectly well what would suit the two of them. Harry nervously ran his fingers through his hair, which had grown out a bit and curled beautifully at the ends.

Numerous flashes went off as they made their way across together and the fans cheered and waved. Soon they were led to separate section which was roped off from the entrance ; the nominees were to be interviewed before they entered the building. Harry's heart skipped a beat as the air carried a voice with heavy northern accent, a voice he knew so well. Taylor had heard it too and to his utter horror, started leading them towards the voice. As they made their way through the crowd of people, he spotted Louis, having an animated conversation with Robert Downey Jr. He'd been nominated for his movie Dolittle. Louis looked so happy that Harry stopped dead in his tracks. He was seeing Louis laugh after a long time and he certainly didn't want to go stand in front of him and wipe it away.

Much to his reluctance, Taylor held his arm and walked over to Louis. Louis smiled heartily at Taylor and as soon as he spotted Harry beside her, his smile vanished, just as Harry had feared. Little did Harry know, that it took everything in Louis' power to hold his ground and not stupidly smile at Harry. Louis had been wondering for the past few days if he had indeed been hard on Harry and whether or not it was just a misunderstanding, but seeing him with Taylor again, sort of brought him back to square one.

"Hi," Taylor beamed.

"Hey Taylor, good to see you," Louis replied, looking around, possibly for Roman or somebody else to rescue him.

"Looking good," Taylor said with a smirk.

"Haha thanks," Louis blushed, "you look gorgeous."

"Thank you Louis. Are we on camera yet?"

"No, just one moment, someone will be here."

Louis was obviously confused at Taylor and Harry being in front of him. Had the list been changed? Why didn't anyone tell him? And WHAT are the odds of him getting the interview he dreaded.

In a few seconds a cameraman arrived and just when Louis was supposed to start, Roman appeared out of nowhere.

"Good lord, where have you been?" Louis asked.

"Sorry, something urgent came up," Roman replied and then turning to Taylor he said, "So Taylor, we have a special fan who has journeyed for 32 hours to see you. Would you like to meet her?"

"Why of course! Lead the way."

Harry made to join Taylor, but she just turned around and said, "I'll be back," leaving Harry with Louis and the cameraman, who was ready to start recording.

Seeing no way out, Louis decided to get it over with as soon as possible.

"So Harry," he started with an unusually high pitched voice. He cleared his throat and resumed, "this is your first time at the Academy Awards. How does it feel?"

Harry hadn't spoken even once when Taylor and Louis were talking. His voice seemed to have died away in his throat. At that moment, he just wanted to hug Louis and apologize. With great difficulty he regained his composure and replied, "I'm nervous obviously and also very excited. It's not everyday that I get to be in the same room with so many special people."

"Speaking of special people, it's really wonderful that both you and Taylor got nominated and it would be double the celebration if both of you won tonight."

Harry could feel the edge in Louis' voice, and tried to push back the pang of sadness that was rising in his stomach.

"Yeah, definitely, I do hope both of us win."

"Well then good luck."

Harry smiled and stepped back from Louis, and instantly Taylor arrived again and took his arm as they made their way inside.

After an hour more of interviews, Louis found his way inside to where Zayn and Liam were sitting. They had arrived with him before the red carpet event began. Zayn noticed how flustered Louis looked and understood what the reason could have been.

"You okay Lou?"

"Yeah I'm fine."

"You don't look so good."

"It was very warm outside, I'm tired."

"Sure there isn't anything else?"

"No."

Before Zayn could press further, the lights dimmed out and the voice of the host boomed through the speakers,

"Welcome to the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.."

Harry wasn't sitting that far and Louis had to force himself to look straight ahead. He wouldn't let his eyes stray to where Harry was sitting with his girlfriend. Harry on the other hand, couldn't help but steal glances every once in a while at Louis' direction.

The ceremony proceeded pleasantly, other than the prickling sensation Louis was having, a feeling of being watched, everything was good and soon it was time for Harry's category.

"The next award is for the Best Actor and I'd like to call Leonardo DiCaprio on the stage to present it."

Louis stiffened. He was sure Harry was super nervous. He'd wanted to win this so badly.

With as much subtlety he could muster, he looked at Harry's direction, hoping to catch his eyes and at that very moment, Harry looked at him too, brows slightly furrowed with anticipation. He gave a little nod in Harry's direction and hoped that Harry understood him ; that he was proud of Harry no matter what.

Both of them looked away at Leo DiCaprio's voice booming through the speakers, "and the Academy Award for best actor goes to-"

Silence filled the hall and Harry could only hear the sound of his heart hammering in his chest. Louis' acknowledgement had been a comfort, but nothing had prepared him for this moment.

"--Harry Styles!"

The hall erupted in a roar of applause and cheers and Harry nervously stood up. After hugging Taylor and Niall and glancing once at Louis' direction, he made his way to the stage.

Harry had always been a shy person and currently a hall full of people, looking at his direction didn't make it easy for him. His heart was racing, given the adrenaline rush and he couldn't stop smiling. He was given the microphone to give a speech, but he just couldn't think of anything proper to say.

As the applause subsided, he started,

"Thank you so so much for the award. When I was working on the movie, I certainly didn't realise that we would come this far. My Policeman is an important movie and I feel lucky that I was chosen for it. Thanks to my director and my entire team who guided me throughout. Thanks to my family, currently watching me from home, who always supported me in everything and thanks to my loved ones for always wishing the best for me."

He let his eyes linger on Louis as he said this and a second later, the hall echoed with claps again.

The next category was for Best Actress and as expected, Taylor Swift bagged it. Confidence radiated from every inch of her face as she took the microphone for her speech.

"Wow, I wasn't expecting this, and was really nervous about it, even though my friend told me that I ought not to because this is like my 100th Oscar."

She air quoted the last word and winked at Harry as the people around laughed. "But thanks to the people who supported me through out the years and got me where I am today. I would be nowhere without you guys. Love you all." The applause after her speech was deafening. She was truly an icon.

For the rest of the evening, it became increasingly difficult for Harry to sit still. He couldn't wait for it to get over so that he could talk to Louis. But these things are easier said than done. As soon as the ceremony was over, he was being dragged back to his limo, as they were supposed to go to the after party hosted by Jennifer Aniston. It was more like a get together really and if Harry tried, he could get away, but Taylor wouldn't let him.

"Louis is coming too," was all she had to say to make Harry voluntarily come with her. This time Zayn got in with them too and they stopped at Zayn's studio for the change of outfits.

PREVIOUS / NEXT

INTRO

#i love you 3000 #larry stylinson #louis tomlinson #harry styles #liam payne #zayn malik #niall horan #taylor swift #marvel #mcu #larry #ziam #lilo #zouis #lirry #narry #zarry #nouis #niam #ziall #social media au #smau #halo stylinson #louis styles #harry tomlinson

[bluewinnerangel]

Hi can you give your observations of why and when Zarry started up? It seems like another "anyone but Louis" thing to me, maybe unintentional by the boys but definitely seems like someone tried to seed it? What are your thoughts? Do you know any Larries who have observations or post on it? And any thoughts on ways in which Zayn leaving has to do with Larrie as well.

Hey! Soooooooooo either this is a funny coincidoink or you also sent something to @genuineconspiracy because here is your answer. Really that just covers it all <3 As for Zarry, again ^it's covered too, but open this if you wanna see me sink a boat I guess:

I don't think there was some active seeding of this, I think it evolved naturally. I feel Zayn was always a supportive friend that looked out for everyone (someone fetch me that Zayn being the mom of the group masterpost) and kinda wiggled his way in between Louis&Harry lot (as did Niall) to like cover for them whenever the lil shits were lost in eachother again. Especially in the early days there's just these little moments, I think there was a lot of trying to make them all seem like "oh but we all behave like that with eachother" and sure a lot of that was natural like they truly were just a pile of limbs, but I think also a lot of that was (still a natural response but) intentional like oh shit they're exposing themselves again lemme just do what they're doing so it won't look coupley. And it just kinda went from there?

And a lot of "flirting" behavior of Harry (with everyone[men] really) was just being a stage hoe lol, but then only watch those moments isolated with Zayn and suddenly people think they got a point lol. Carefully picked footage (which you can do with any 2 in the band, although I'd like to see you try with Niall and Liam) looking like they were into eachother. And I mean, yeah sure it does, I agree Zarry seems to have more "tension" than the other pairings, but Have You Seen Harry Looking At A Muppet!??! Poor dude looks like he's about to tear off his clothes. Have You Seen HAVE YOU SEEN Zayn Staring Into The Distance!?!? Poor dude's looking like he's seeing the love of his life walk down the aisle. REALLY it's really really easy to cherrypick footage and turn it into something it's not (there's so much Larry crap out there too like that, sorrynotsorry), ESPECIALLY when your 2 favs are "hot" like that and just look at stuff like that at all times, and then you can explode when they look at each other.

And yeah in terms of why people still to this day think that was (or even is) a thing I know there's more to it, I have looked into Zarry believe me I've thrown myself into that hole and come out the other end with like dirt in my face and branches in my hair like I know that's not all that makes that ship somehow still afloat, but none of it really... works? It's just pointing at the things they do that's similar basically.

Meanwhile Louis

#zarry #honestly i couldve gone a lot worse than this

[1ddiscourseoftheday]

Wed 12 May ‘21

Zayn said FREE PALESTINE!! He posted a slideshow with info about the current crisis of human rights violations in Jerusalem and other parts of occupied Palestine with a heartfelt statement, and tweeted a UNICEF link to donate to support children under fire in Gaza. “I stand with the Palestinian people and support their resistance to colonization and protection of their human rights,” said Zayn, “My heart aches for the families who have lost loved ones. We can not stand as silent witnesses to children being orphaned and murdered and not demand for the human rights of all Palestinians! This must end. Free Palestine.” Zayn has always stood with the Palestinian people as part of his own cultural heritage- or perhaps just as a caring person educated on the issues- and I imagine now being the parent of a baby who is part Palestinian from her mom’s side has only strengthened that commitment.

LTtour22 planning is truly underway, with venues being shuffled and tickets going on sale (and resale sites price gouging like you wouldn’t believe). Point of sale tickets are still reasonably priced for most markets though!

More Brits news from yesterday-- host Jack Whitehall continued his tradition of making fun of his friend Niall and then getting canceled by fans for it, making a joke about how they had to limit the award show audience so they “billed it as a Niall Horan gig”, and doing a Q and A about Niall and Lewis Capaldi pretending to accost him backstage last year after he called Niall “the other one” from 1D. Predictably, fans got super upset! Not turkey puppet level upset or anything, but pretty mad nonetheless. Niall did not respond, but he did like a post about Little Mix calling out the “white male dominance” at the awards and comment a little clappy hands on a Gucci post about Harry’s Brit win. Anne Marie posted a pic of her making a funny face and facetiming Niall, and an EXCELLENT set pic of her and Niall filming the video for their alleged collab song; Niall commented “cannot wait,” and yet it seems to me like he CAN wait as that is in fact what we are still doing!

Fans also got worked up post-Brits about Harry’s acceptance speech; specifically, his accent, with enough people saying he sounded American that actual articles were written saying he used an American accent. I… don’t agree? He just sounds like Harry?? My theory is we aren’t used to hearing Harry speaking back to back with Louis anymore and the contrast with his samsung ad just threw people off, lol. But if you want some all-American Harry related content, I don’t think it gets more American than Jon Bon Jovi; he played Watermelon Sugar for a charity event. A little weird but definitely better than the Bardcore version, I’ll give him that! Harry himself was back to work bright and early today, filming My Policeman (presumably not with an American accent)- today brings silent video of him in an alley, smoking, in a sweater vest, and on the street, smoking, with a duffel bag.

Liam was featured in Polish Vogue talking about the Hugo perfume campaign. Asked about childhood scents he says (like Harry), “Every time I hear this question, I think about the scent of Disneyland. I don't know what exactly it is, but I feel my memories drift over there,” and that as well as acting he’d like to try his hand at filming.

#zayn #Louis tomlinson #niall horan #harry styles #liam payne #hey look ot5 day! lIam just squeaking in that really wasn't new content but hey #it counts #opposing colonialism and oppression shouldn’t require a disclaimer but just in case you wanna fight me I WILL invoke identity politics; #I am Jewish and the descendant of literal concentration camp victims and THAT IS WHY I say ISRAEL MUST BE STOPPED #I will condemn zionist apartheid with my dying breath. Fuck Israel and fuck zionism #NEVER AGAIN doesn’t mean only for white people Palestinian genocide is also genocide #free palestine! #it seems like there’s just one code for Louis presales HMU if you need it #jon bon jovi #dustin the turkey puppet #jack whitehall #anne marie #12 may 21m #happy anniversary HS1 #what a good album #lttour #harry also talked about disneyland in a perfume ad #he said his childhood scent memory was of his mom's perfume at disneyland #whereas liam was just like eh cotton candy and shit #as I read this #lol

[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!”

#harry styles #harry update #article #vogue #november 2020

[1ddotdhq]

👱🏻‍♀️Thurs 12 Nov ‘20🎸

Niall and Ashe’s performance on yesterday’s Late Late Show was, of course, gorgeous! No other songs, unfortunately, but the interview did give Niall a chance to run through all of his RAH talking points again, as well as describing the odd circumstances that had brought him and Ashe together. Ashe said they instantly felt like old friends, and then they compared the situation to a reality dating show, cue awkward chuckling all around. Oddly enough, I almost think they had more chemistry through zoom than they do irl, sigh. Guess it's all right we can’t all meet our online friends: sometimes distance truly does make the heart grow fonder! In what could perhaps be called the end of the HBW era, Niall has changed his twitter layout to pictures of himself during the RAH show. The question now becomes: is this just the end of an era, or the beginning of a new one as well? He's been clear that NH3 won't happen until the circumstances of the world change (change back?) so what would that mean? Anne-Marie, who was working with him earlier this month, said that they wrote three “brilliant” songs in the studio that day (she was like “wow, you’re actually talented” when Niall began showing off his instrumental prowess). Niall + blond female collaborator/promo tour BFF has proved to be a winning formula many times over now, perhaps we can mark time in these uncertain months by how many of these collabs we see from Niall! He is also donating a signed guitar to Wishio (an app that connects celebrities with causes) to raise more money for We Need Crew. I wonder if this guitar will sell for more or less than the $28k Harry's did, do you think, and will this one actually sell to a fan? Whatever it goes for will just be the icing on top of the over ￡2 million the RAH show ended up bringing in for the cause.

Speaking of $28k guitars and the people who signed them, we learned a bit more about H’s project with Gucci: it’s a seven episode mini-series that follows the character of Silvia (presumably Not Harry) through her “eccentric morning routine” in her home in Rome before “the arrival of an unexpected visitor”, who seems to work some kind of magic, and her day becomes a surrealist experience in a Gucci-filled reality. The titles of some of these episodes are “The Theatre”, “In the Cafe” and “The Neighbours”, none of which sound very COVID-friendly to me, but at least there is one called “At Home”. The series, which will be streamed online from the 16th to the 22nd (which, holy shit, that’s next week, how are we not still in July?), and is called “Ouverture of Something That Never Ended”, which would be a stunning alternative title to Fine Line, tbh. It is unclear which exact episodes Harry will appear in, or who will be playing the part of Silvia, but I have created a Gucci account to receive regular updates on this thing (the things I do…) so you will all know when I do! Harry has also been nominated for, uh, EVERY category of J-14′s 2020 Teen Icon Awards, Niall is in almost as many, and Liam and Louis and Zayn are each in one. Gotta say, I think J-14 is a bit obsessed. It’s okay, love, we’ve all been there. 

Abby Roberts, the Spooky Makeup Queen, put up a ‘Day in the Life’ video on YouTube with some fun bloopers and behind the scenes from the LP show, which means we got to relive the moment where Liam admitted that Louis dared him to pull Harry’s pants down, and the Tik Tok live, which broke several times, because it’s not a 1D event without the full array of technical difficulties. Liam continued his celebration of the armed forces today with a one on one golfing outing with ex special forces/current TV personality Jason Carl Fox. The picture is of them standing around, and WHOA Liam’s beard is REALLY growing (uh, pun not intended, but please feel free to take it that way). Is this a picture evidence of a flagrant disregard for the UK’s  lockdown? Uh, it appears to be, yes, but I’m happy to see Liam happy, at any rate. And, in true supportive Liam fashion, Liam sent out an email reminding people that Tom Felton will be doing a Veeps “19 years later” watch-along at 12 PT, ft. Willow, Tom’s dog. Liam asks us, “I’ll be watching along, will you?” 

#niall horan #harry styles #liam payne #and zouis is MIA #i mean technically H is too but y'all know what i mean #also i want to clarify something really quickly re: the Ticketmaster thing from yesterday #the part that i was uncomfortable with was not the 'mandatory vaccine' bit #though i would love the reassurance that the vaccine is safe and has gone through the rigorous and necessary trials #before they are distributed #BUT i understand the need for a mandatory vaccine #I even understand the need for a national record of who has been vaccinated and who has not #but what i am DEFINITELY uncomfortable with is that my medical records would/could be given to a third party private for profit corporation #and then to Ticketmaster which is ANOTHER private for profit corporation #that just seems like it could cause a massive problem if someone were to say...hack the system #and steal the data #and think of the data mining! #it just all seems like it hasnt been thought out with consumer privacy in mind #BUT i am very very very pro-vax #vaccinate urself vaccinate ur kids please and thank you #anyways! #song of the day! #So It Goes by Billy Joel #which is a reference to Slaughterhouse Five which I really really love!! #but also the song is sad and sweet and i knew it complete etc.

[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!”

#harry styles #vogue #131120