You don’t need a feather boa to make an impact, just a great pair of jeans and a tee—ask Harry Styles. The X Factor talent show success story and post-boyband boy unleashed his latest album campaign on January 15 and the sum of its parts was: jeans + tee + discoball. It blew the internet wide open.
Shot by Vogue favorite Johnny Dufort, who is known for his color-saturated, humor-filled photography, a bespectacled Styles appears bathed in shimmering light while wearing a blue Patrick Carroll t-shirt emblazoned with the album’s title Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally and vintage jeans. The choice of brand is everything.
LA-based Carroll learned to knit during the depths of Covid and was plucked from obscurity by Jonathan Anderson’s team, who connected with the provocative messaging on his often camp pieces. Now firmly rooted in the art world, rather than fashion’s more frivolous landscape, Carroll crafts “picture poem paintings.” (Congratulations to T magazine, which profiled him back in 2024.) Of course, no one declines an invitation from Harry Styles, or indeed his stylist Harry Lambert, who is the driving force behind the popstar’s style and spiritually aligned with Anderson and Carroll’s world.
It’s not enough to commission a craft-conscious piece loaded with meaning, the fit is make or break. Styles’s ever-so-slightly shrunken, woven tee sits tautly across his torso to gently remind us of the fact that this is a man who can bust out the Berlin marathon in under three hours. Were it not for a discreet black under-layer, we’d have been able to see his signature butterfly tattoo stamped on his abs.
Thought the tee was tricky to nail? Those classic mid-wash blue jeans are the holy grail of vintage. People (us) spend years trying to track down the right old-school Levi’s that have that distinct workaday aesthetic, but fit like a glove and telegraph a kind of subtle, everyday sex appeal. Paired with an immaculately cut t-shirt, there is, quite simply, nothing better. You’ve nailed life. Congratulations.
Styles’s spruced-up version of the everyman uniform chimes with the current proliferation of logo tees in fashion (an easy entry point into a brand’s universe, everyone has something to say!), but it also positions Harry alongside the forefathers of hot basics who have commanded stadiums before him. Bruce Springsteen, an exceptional proponent of tight jeans and bicep-hugging T-shirts, knew the power of a democratic uniform to seduce fans. George Michael’s stretched vests and stonewashed straight-legs represented his own kind of sexual awakening. The most universal fashion pieces can say so much.