Some people turned to controlled substances, tie-dye matching sets, or the ubiquitous sourdough. But it was Harry Styles in a Gucci chick-egg sweater, crooning about oral pleasure on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series, that got me through some of the gloomiest days of 2020.
Shot in pre-pandemic February, the dreamy acoustic set, including riffs on the smash singles “Watermelon Sugar” and “Adore You,” is a 16-minute serotonin rush: Styles, in his gravelly tenor, singing that he’d walk through fire for you; Styles, with his perfect, princely hair and rugged stubble, dancing on a swiveling office chair. It’s unbearably charming, sensual, and fundamentally joyful; the 26-year-old Brit feels like a burst of confetti in a relentlessly terrible year.
Styles’s sophomore solo album, Fine Line, was released at the tail end of 2019, but it fully bloomed in 2020. “Watermelon Sugar,” his first number one solo single in the U.S., was the undisputed earworm of summer; “Adore You” was the second most-listened-to song of the year, according to Variety, which named Styles hitmaker of the year. It’s no coincidence that Fine Line was streamed more than one billion times in the throes of a global, deadly pandemic: “It’s an album full of uptempo, unabashedly fun bops,” beauty writer Tia Williams, author of the forthcoming novel Seven Days in June and an avowed Styles fan, told Vogue. “‘Watermelon Sugar,’ ‘Adore You,’ and ‘Sunflower’ are like rays of light beaming on Laurel Canyon.”
Styles’s shiny, happy, summer-of-love aura provided a desperately needed antidote to 2020. The “Watermelon Sugar” video, dropped in May, was “dedicated to touching,” a colorful, quasi orgy on the beach that both made me long for the innocence of the Before Times and felt—for three minutes, anyway—like an escape from the horrors of the news cycle.
Although “2020 has been such a terrifying year,” Williams said, the cheeky world of “Watermelon Sugar” “can’t help but take you away from our grim reality.” Tyler McCall, editor in chief of Fashionista.com, has been “listening to Fine Line on repeat just to get through the year,” she told me. “I think it’s impossible to be in a bad mood when you’re listening to ‘Golden.’” (It must be noted too that the album’s suite of breakup songs, like “Cherry,” spoke to the forlorn, aching nature of the pandemic.)
McCall and Williams both took a shine to Styles during the One Direction era, with Williams citing his “ethereal beauty, tats, and ’70s-rock-style songs.” I made the grave mistake of overlooking Styles in his 1D infancy, shrugging him off as just another basic, beanie-clad boy-band member. But I learned this year that he’s a sex god like Jagger, a showman like Elton, and a boundary pusher in the grand tradition of Bowie, with his own personal ethos of inclusivity and sweetness. The 11th track on Fine Line—the retro-groovy “Treat People With Kindness”—is also a Styles mantra, splashed on official merch and backed up by vocal support of the LGBTQ+ community, a pledge to back Black Lives Matter, the legendary act of feeding a fan’s fish after taking temporary shelter when his car broke down in October, and not speaking ill of his exes, even on Howard Stern. “I just don’t think you need to be a dick to be a good artist,” Styles told The Guardian last year.
“He makes niceness chic,” Williams said, choosing an “un-edgy, totally earnest mantra” despite his rock-star bona fides. “Harry Styles is the heart-eyes emoji sprung to life.” (At first, Williams says she felt peculiar fangirling a former boy-bander as a 40-something Black mom. “I wondered if I was having a midlife crisis,” she told me, “but then I was introduced to actress/producer/novelist Robinne Lee, whose brilliant novel The Idea of You, was inspired by him and who is herself a 40-something Black mom, and I was like, Yes, I’ve found my people.”)
Styles’s beautiful soul is just one reason why I stand by my own budding fandom, even as I’m mocked by certain family members and even my six-year-old daughter for requesting T-shirts from his official store as my only Christmas gift or vaulting myself down the Harry YouTube rabbit hole. (Please seek out his duet with Lizzo on “Juice” at her Miami show at the Fillmore back in January, another world ago.) But it’s not just that he reads Alain de Botton, writes his own music, wears insane sweaters, and has a cosmic connection with Stevie Nicks. Styles also strikes me as a man uniquely suited to the moment.
In an era of grotesque, Trump-fueled toxic masculinity, the sexiest thing about Styles is that he’s comfortable in his femininity. What began with his sheer blouse and single drop earring at the 2019 Met Gala flourished in 2020 with a spate of traditionally femme fashion, including fishnets, a signature pearl necklace, and a Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue as the first solo male to ever appear there.
Tyler Mitchell’s Vogue shoot “felt significant because it’s still so rare to see male celebrities challenge conventional ideals of masculinity,” Liz Plank, author of For the Love of Men, told Vogue. “We still live in a culture that encourages us to protect girls from gendered expectations and stereotypes, but that gets very uncomfortable when we suggest doing the same for boys.”
The way Styles dresses and the fact that he paints his nails and wears stacked heels beneath his sailor pants continually prompts speculation about sexuality, and I can’t help but notice that this doesn’t trigger him or elicit passionate defenses or assertions that he is not gay. When The Guardian asked if he’d ever been asked if he is bisexual, Styles replied, “It’s just: Who cares?” He denies he’s “sprinkling in nuggets of sexual ambiguity to try and be more interesting,” as he puts it. “I want things to look a certain way. Not because it makes me look gay or it makes me look straight or it makes me look bisexual but because I think it looks cool... I just think sexuality’s something that’s fun.”
Styles’s splendor-in-the-grass moment in Vogue sparked a now infamous backlash from conservative talking head Candace Owens, who whined: “Bring back manly men.” That reaction “is proof that women can be just as sexist and drunk on the patriarchal Kool-Aid as men,” Plank said, adding that the right wing is creating a “moral masculinity panic—this idea that men are under attack by feminism.” Plank credits Styles but also notes that “there’s a courageous pack of masculinity-bending, often LGBTQ or gender-nonbinary men who have been rocking these same looks for decades getting punished for it rather than celebrated for it.”
Styles has become a fashion influencer for folks across the gender spectrum, including McCall, who now feels inspired to wear her grandmother’s pearls “without seeming prim and uptight.” Ryan Kazmarek, a Harry devotee and stylist at IGK SoHo in New York, is still mourning the fact that coronavirus thwarted his plan to fly to Styles’s now postponed shows in Manchester, United Kingdom, with his boyfriend, William. Styles’s fearlessness “has opened my eyes,” Kazmarek told me. “I have recently been like, Okay, I’m going to check the women’s section.”
For his next act, Styles, who had a small but memorable role as a British soldier in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, will star in Olivia Wilde’s forthcoming psychological-horror film, Don’t Worry Darling. The photos of a dapper, suited Styles on the set has already overwhelmed Harries. “I don’t even like horror movies—they literally give me nightmares—and still I am mentally handing my money over to Olivia Wilde,” McCall said.
The year 2020 may (finally) be on its way out, but the pure joy of stanning Styles, music and fashion’s Renaissance man, will endure for years to come. Playing “Fine Line” for the millionth time, the following “Treat People with Kindness” lyrics recently stuck out, seeming to sum up Styles and the spirit he brought to this bleak year: “Feeling good in my skin / I just keep on dancin’ / And if we’re here long enough / We’ll see it’s all for us.”