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Harry Styles was last month photographed in Rome with a cornrowed Alessandro Michele. The designer – who was at least in part responsible for the musician’s lean into pussy-bows, feather boas and flared suits in the latter half of the 2010s – had just been appointed creative director of Valentino. Styles was probably among the first to know that Michele would release a surprise 189-piece Cruise collection replete with ruffled collars, ’70s headscarves, beaded collars and shaman separates.
And yet, he so far seems to have resisted the siren call of a poet-sleeve blouse. (I’d imagine the Valentino press team is perhaps waiting for the appropriate red-carpet moment to seed Michele’s vision into the wild.) And so, Styles was papped wearing a more inconspicuous outfit: a shrunken and striped T-shirt – that Reddit stans are describing as “Bert and Ernie style for modern times”, and comparing to a custom Gucci tee he wore to promote Harry’s House – with straight-leg jeans and the now-too-ubiquitous Adidas Sambas. He casually threw a jacket over one shoulder as if it were a damsel in distress.
Speaking of distress: small tremors of thirst began to ricochet when Twitter users noticed that Styles had grown a baby mullet. (Paul Mescal be damned.) Styles’s flamboyant experiments with Michele might have encouraged an entire generation of men to purchase pearl necklaces and button their waistbands around their rib cages, but consider this proof that Styles looks his best when he is at his most civilian.