After 2022’s Grammy-winning Harry’s House and its attendant 22-month Love On Tour, Harry Styles all but vanished from public view, with only the occasional pap shot – strolling Rome’s cobblestones or cutting across Hampstead in an ever-expanding collection of sneakerinas – serving as proof of life. But this morning, after more than three years of silence, music. At over five minutes long, “Aperture”, the lead single from his forthcoming album – Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally – has been praised as a counterpoint to today’s made-for-TikTok-hits, burning slowly from a minimalist electronic pulse into room-tilting half-sounds and -thoughts: “I’ve no more tricks up my sleeve/ Game called review the player.”
I suppose it’s slightly more cerebral than, say, “As it Was”, and so, in the accompanying video, he wears custom Prada: the thinking man’s brand. The look is grown up, a little hot liberal arts professor, comprising a navy cotton-poplin overcoat, a grey cashmere knit, a shirt, woollen trousers and lime-green Collapse trainers. (The slimline-sneaker moment he helped to usher in, it seems, is far from over.) Fashion historians will also clock the lip-stamped print on his shirt as belonging to Miuccia Prada’s spring/summer 2000 collection – the same offering that birthed the lipstick motif immortalised by Charlotte York – where it appeared on a pleated skirt worn by Stella Tennant and a be-ribboned vest on Audrey Marnay. Vogue described the collection as “one of the most influential and successful of the season”, praising Prada’s semi-transparent dresses, oversized travel bags and big sunglasses for their “cosmopolitan panache”, while adding that “it is precisely this knack for endowing classic, seemingly normal clothes with masterful fashion sense that keeps the audience begging for more”.
The same could be said of Styles’s subtle but significant style shift during his away years, which saw him enjoy a more civilian, or “normal”, wardrobe. Take, for example, the time he was photographed in Rome in 2024 with Alessandro Michele – the man responsible for all his pussy-bows, feather boas and flamboyantly flared suits of the late 2010s – wearing a striped T-shirt, Levi’s and Adidas Sambas. Or, more recently, when he stepped out in a long, grey Olsen-made wool coat and slacks for a walk around NW1 in 2025. (In fact, was this not pretty much the same look he wears in the “Aperture” video?) If Styles the performer in spangled jumpsuits and Styles the man in sensible trousers once felt like separate forces, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally – the artwork for which finds him wearing nothing more than a Patrick Carroll T-shirt and jeans from The Vintage Showroom – suggests that the distance between them may now be narrowing. Though, to be fair, he has always worn dainty trainers.
