Harry Styles has been looking a lot less gay recently. As someone who has followed Harry Styles quite closely since his solo debut (and even since his One Direction days), I cannot help but notice that his current era, attached to his fourth studio album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. is different.

Since going solo in 2017, cultural commentators have endlessly scrutinised Styles’ sartorial choices, especially during the rollout of his second studio album Fine Line in 2019 and 2020. As he said during his recent Saturday Night Live monologue, “Back then, people seemed to pay a lot of attention to the clothes I was wearing, and some people accused me of something called queerbaiting.”

To me, queerbaiting is tricky terminology to apply to celebrities. A celebrity like Styles may understandably want to keep his personal relationships private from the public eye, which means that applying the term to people’s actual lives is fundamentally highly speculative. Styles himself neatly cauterises this discussion by asking “did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t know everything about me, Dad?!” Discussions of queerbaiting sometimes problematically define queerness in strict opposition to heterosexuality. These discussions omit exploration of the messy or fluid in-between spaces in which people’s gender and sexuality often exist.

If we seriously ask how Styles is queer rather than queerbaiting, his ambiguous representation of gender is a more interesting discussion than his ambiguous sexuality. It is undeniable that, at least up until now, Styles’ gender representation has been a queered masculinity. He is interested in experimenting with femininity with his masculine identity as a foundation. More specifically, we can class Styles’ embodiment of queer style as that of a ‘pop dandy’ (to use Stan Hawkins’ term) in the legacy of Mick Jagger or David Bowie, who similarly played with androgynous and/or glam-rock gender-bending performances of masculinities.

Harry Styles performing “Falling” at BRIT Awards, 2020.  

Prince wearing lace outfit on-stage, Michael Ochs Archives, 1985.

Styles has sartorially and playfully challenged the supposed boundaries of masculinity and femininity––from bedazzled jumpsuits, glittery pussybow blouses, to his wearing of notoriously androgynous designers, including in his 2020 Vogue spread where he donned a light blue Gucci gown. As a dandy, he constructs the self as a work of art, aestheticizing masculinity in a way that heteronormative binaries decree is off-limits for men. Dandyism as queer politics works by reworking heteronormativity, boldly stating that a ‘man’ can be feminine. It reveals the artifice of gender boundaries, breaking down (although not entirely abolishing) the binary opposition between genders.

Now to be clear, I am all for musicians evolving and experimenting with new styles and genres. This is something that defines Styles as an innovative pop artist with unique taste and vision.

But the artist’s style attached to his new album is looking somewhat less queer. Lately, he is harkening back to classic and vintage menswear silhouettes, including custom Valentino suits at SNL and in the “American Girls” music video, complete with crisp business shirts and brightly hued ties that evoke the 1930s, ‘40s or ‘50s. (Shout out to styleslookbook.com for doing the Lord’s work to source the designers of Harry’s looks.) The colour palette and use of patterns is also much more muted. He still plays with some androgynous and glamorous elements, such as Chanel jackets in feminine cuts paired with vintage Levi’s jeans in the SNL farewell segment.

However, he seems overall less interested in this current era in putting his body on spectacular (and feminised) display as in previous eras, like the music videos for “Falling” and “Lights Up”. Shaad D’Souza’s (largely negative) Pitchfork review of Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. called Styles’ latest album an effort in “tasteful restraint” rather than emotionality.

Echoing the music, then, Styles still exhibits the taste he is known for sartorially. He aligns his album rollout with a procession of well-cut designer fashions––similar to the ‘method dressing’ popularised by celebrity stylists such as Law Roach styling Ariana Grande, and Andrew Mukamal styling Margot Robbie. Though, this is undoubtedly tempered by Styles’ latent fall back into ‘traditional’ masculinity. He has made a trade of his aestheticized and flamboyant style for a more restrained or classical sartorial appearance.

Rather than arguing that, therefore, Styles was queerbaiting in the past (which, to be clear, I do not believe is true), Styles’ current style actually allows us to delve deeper in the complex layers of his cultural touchpoints and influences. For instance, the silhouette of his black pinstripe Chanel suit with a light mint pinstripe shirt and striped grey tie, worn at the BRIT Awards in February, reminded me directly of a Zoot suit. Zoot suits are aligned to Black and Latinx counter-cultural rebellion, developed with a distinct oversized silhouette to flout fabric rationing rules during World War II.

It is not only in this new era where Black style has been a touchpoint for Styles. His glittering suits, bright patterns, and pussybow neckties of the Fine Line era call to mind performers like Little Richard, who paved the way for Jagger and Bowie. Styles’ performance at the Brits in 2019, where he wore a head-to-toe lace jumpsuit by Gucci, is the direct legacy of a similar look Prince wore onstage in 1985. That is, Styles continually pays homage to Black, as well as white, pop dandies.

Since the eighteenth century, Black dandies have used sartorial style to re-assert agency over how Black bodies were represented. They play on the elitism of white sartorial mores for men, appropriating crisp tailoring and displaying rigorous self-presentation. The Black dandy adds race to the societal hierarchies and identity signifiers that are troubled by his deployment of self-conscious display. As Monica Miller wrote in her 2009 cultural history of the Black dandy, a key reference text for last year’s Met Gala theme, the “black dandy’s method of choice is sartorial style and élan — his crafting and wielding of these weapons allow him to fashion freedom out of ambiguity” (p.15).

Comparatively, Styles’ camp dandyism relies on collaborations with elite European design houses, and the wealth and cultural capital Styles wields to spend time on aestheticizing himself. In the context of 21^st century celebrity and consumer culture, his dandyism is not seeking to commit the same deconstructing mockery by emulating elitist structures of class and race that other dandies historically have.

Nonetheless, even when less overtly ‘queer’, Styles retains his status as a dandy through sustained connection to a diverse dandy lineage, including Eurocentric and Black queered masculinities. My point here is to highlight the history that is referenced in Styles’ looks, of both white and Black musical dandies. It pays to recognise the deep influence Black style, musically and sartorially, has had on Western popular music.

It is always a Fine Line between appreciation or influence and appropriation, but I would argue that appropriation is not necessarily the right conceptual tack here. Rather, Styles’ whiteness and his wealth (and, admittedly, his public engagement in heterosexual relationships) are privileges that allow Styles to dress as he does, and to get away with it as a matter of celebrity persona. Comparatively, many other queer people (especially queer People of Colour) are vilified and attacked for expressing their queerness sartorially. That privilege also means he is arguably one of the most successful solo male artists globally, rather than Black artists who similarly perform queered masculinities, like Kid Cudi, Jaden Smith or Lil Nas X. Styles does not disingenuously appropriate Black or queer style, but his fashion does have roots in Black and queer styles that belies his privilege, as well as our tendency as an audience to perhaps over-celebrate white men’s genderplay without proper analysis of its roots.