Harry Styles on the

Cover of Vogue

Harry Styles on the Cover of Vogue

by Alvina Shafqat

Undoubtedly, Harry Styles has been having an incredible year for his career - he released his second album Fine Line just before the beginning of 2020 on December 13, 2019. Just ten days after the release of Fine Line, it received 109 million streams and sold 393,000 million physical copies of the album. On January 9, 2020 he released his music video for “Adore you'', which reached 181 million views to date, and just recently he released the last music video for Fine Line called “Golden”. These are just a few of the things he has achieved this year. On November 13, 2020 Harry Styles broke barriers for being the first solo man to be on the cover of Vogue.

Click the pic to stream Fine Line!

Vogue Magazine announced that Styles will be on the December issue, and on his cover picture, he is wearing a blue ball gown and a black blazer while blowing a balloon. Unfortunately, this received backlash, especially from republican author Candice Owens, when on November 16 she tweeted “There is no society that can survive without strong men. The East knows this. In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack. Bring back manly men.” Not only do her beliefs show how wrong she is, but also that she's living in the past and her perspective of men is someone in a suit and tie or jeans and a t-shirt. What you wear and how to act has nothing to do with your masculinity and there are many people who came to Styles’s defence including actress and filmmaker Olivia Wilde, whose new movie Don’t Worry Darling stars Styles himself.

Wilde had a simple yet significant response (“you’re pathetic”) to the old-fashioned tweet made by Owens. In Styles’s Vogue interview, he talked about fashion and how limiting yourself to certain things will eventually keep you out of experiences, “It’s like anything — anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes.” Someone who also came to his defence was U.S representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as AOC. On an Instagram story, she was asked what she thought about Harry Styles wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue. She explains that “It looks wonderful...some people are mad because some folks are very sensitive to examining and exploring gender roles in society.” She also points out that people who are mad about this are probably insecure about masculinity and femininity themselves, and that they should sit with the reaction and grow from it.

Harry Styles is not much of a social media person and in the past has chosen to ignore people who spend their time talking about how someone else should live their life, but he decided to clap back at Owens in the most simple but effective manner. He posted a picture of himself from one of his photoshoots with the caption reading “Bring back manly men” - as in men can dress however they want and it wouldn’t make them any less masculine. With only four words and no hatefulness towards anyone, everyone knew who he was talking about and many fans tweeted their support, “he chose to embrace it and showed us that he doesn't care what people have to say about the way he chooses to dress anymore, men should be able to wear whatever they want, without having to worry about irrelevant hateful opinions from people around. He wants to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity and that's wonderful."

Candace Owens thought that he dedicated the post to her and commented “Thank god you agree” when in reality, he had thrown shade at her through only the caption. She believes that she “inspires global conversation” and later on she posted several Instagram stories about Styles, rambling on about how it’s not masculine to wear dresses. It is evident that Owens is embarrassing herself for telling others what they should and shouldn’t do when someone is happy with the way they are. In the end, no one should tell someone that what they are wearing is too feminine or too masculine because clothes don’t have a gender. This year, Harry Styles also became one of Variety’s Hitmakers, with two of his songs being in the top 25 list. Variety reposted Harry’s picture on Instagram captioning “The manliest man we know.”

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