To gauge just how far Harry Styles’ personal brand has travelled on the world stage in his 13 years of stardom, it’s worth glancing back to the pop star’s first X Factor audition. Then, Styles was a fresh-faced 16-year-old, working part time at a bakery near his family home, in the nice Cheshire hamlet of Holmes Chapel. Wearing a hoodie, plunging white t-shirt and a grey neck-scarf, he resembled an Inbetweener taking baby-steps toward Indie Sleaze; the boy everyone at school thinks will one day be famous. He kissed his mum on the cheek as she smiled her support.
Back then, Harry’s tepid render of Train’s Hey Soul Sister was interrupted by chief whip Simon Cowell, who told him to start again. He then opted for a heartfelt acapella rendition of Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely. In that moment, the audience fell head over heels in love with Harry, establishing everything they would want from him moving forward. They have stayed, exponentially multiplying ever since, crowning a sweet kid with curly hair who once talked about the Northern popularity of Viennese whirls on TV as one of the personal bellwethers of 21st century taste.
Starting tonight, Styles will take his Love on Tour shows for a four-night victory lap to Wembley Stadium, entertaining 360,000 adoring fans with his casual charisma. His third solo album, Harry’s House, was recipient of the 2023 Grammy for Album of the Year. The man who once needed four pals to place second below Matt Cardle in an ITV talent show is now global fame personified.
Harry Styles is a pop star in the 1970s pin-up sense of the profession, making highly likeable music which could easily slot into any decade since. He emerged in One Direction, the loose-fit boyband of five suburban teens who tapped some of the Bay City Rollers’ old energy and turned it into a modern Beatlemania, touched by the dutiful contemporary hysteria ignited by K-Pop. One of the band once told me a story of having to be smuggled out of the back of a New York hotel as a security risk, after collectively declining an invite by Donald Trump to meet his daughter.
Astonishingly, 1D stayed out of politics, mischief or major recrimination. As the country slowly imploded around them, these playful, pretty icons of hungry youth and ambition took a positive spin on wholesome Britishness to the world. Styles was 1D’s David Cassidy, their Donnie Osmond. He understood early on that because he had emerged from Saturday night, primetime TV, with a face the internet would do the hard marketing work with, he didn’t have to find an audience and persuade them of his charms, only to shape and expand his plentiful base.
As a performer, he is a bundle of generous, positive, slightly scrappy, even pleasingly amateurish energy. His great endearment is to appear in no way ruined or sullied by the pop machine, confidently floating above it, oblivious to what others are doing. Styles songs are neither destined nor designed to be venerated as all-time classics, bullet-proofing them from criticism. There is no search for profundity in the perfect glossy shimmer of Watermelon Sugar, As It Was or Music From A Sushi Restaurant. The restaurant in question could be Wagamama, where he came from, or Nobu, where he landed. He sings about sweetness, kindness, adoration. He loves a suggestive fruit metaphor for sex. A Harry Styles song is effervescent and lovely. It is constructed to remind you of a moment, or what it felt like to be alive in the 2020s, when he cut through the ballast of everyday turmoil to become king of the universe, simply by capturing his audience’s desires in a butterfly net.
A 1D affiliate once told me Harry watched Mick Jagger’s turn in Performance every night on the tour bus by way of education for his solo career. He has presented like a one-man Duran Duran, singing songs both crafted outside of, and authentic enough to define, fashion. Right from the start, he also had physical echoes of John Taylor, Duran Duran’s heartthrob bass player, whose first solo cover of the Eighties pop title, Smash Hits became the biggest-selling issue of the magazine. His music sounds expensive, svelte, well-intentioned and always prioritises physical pleasure over interior angst. Nobody wants to hear Harry Styles’ heartbreak record, making him a modern pop anomaly at the top tier.
While not quite religiously sticking to the Kate Moss ‘never complain, never explain’ mantra, Styles’ trajectory has proved a modern masterclass in being simultaneously ubiquitous and unknowable. He seems to do exactly the amount of personal publicity he desires, which isn’t much, giving away little personal detail when he does. At its most potent, fame is a blank, pretty canvas onto which we project our dreams. Standing together, collectively screaming at someone we love, for reasons which defy rational explanation is a primal urge. Styles feels both welcomed and humbled to become its most recognisable recipient. Nobody needed to reinvent the wheel with Harry, just to keep the engine purring, seasoning the journey with enough subtle gear changes to stealthily land him four nights at Wembley Stadium.
As a fashion plate, he is flawless, arriving into the public consciousness as a serious solo proposition at exactly the moment Alessandro Michele decided he wanted to bring the theatrical drama and inventiveness back to Gucci, anointing Styles the brand’s favourite patron saint. This mellifluous conjunction of brand and star elevated both. Styles always looks grateful to be there, if slightly dazzled by the clothes he’s wearing and the fuss that inevitably brings, without ever giving off the impression of being too grateful or unsure of himself to appear needy or desperate. He is disarmingly free of opinion and refreshingly good at being famous, quietly enjoying its spoils, rolling in its perks.
His artist’s positioning sits somewhere between thoughtfulness and tasteful, uncontroversial euphoria, never tipping an astutely aggregated balance, always casting a spell of immaculate ease with himself. In a pop landscape full of exposed flaws and open wounds, he represents a rare subset of personal contentment. In this respect, he might be the perfect pop star. For 90,000 screaming Harry Styles acolytes in London over the coming week, Wembley Stadium will prove the perfect backcloth to scream “thank you”, just for being him.
