ICYMI, last month saw Harry Styles become the first solo man to front Vogue in the magazine’s 128-year-long run, and the internet, as it so often does, had some thoughts.
Photographed by Tyler Mitchell and styled by Harry Lambert in a periwinkle blue Gucci gown for the cover, the images immediately split social media down the middle – with some quick to praise the magazine and Styles himself for seeing beyond the gender binary, and others spitting vitriol about the decision to put him in a dress.
Now, Styles has taken to Instagram to post a cheeky retort to critics of the cover. Dressed in a powder blue cinched suit and a pleated white shirt, and casually eating a banana, the star captioned the photo “Bring back manly men”, after conservative author and Trump advocate Candace Owens Tweeted the statement when the Vogue cover first dropped.
With Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele labelling the cover ‘revolutionary’, the images sparked a number of important conversations surrounding just how radical a cisgender white man wearing a dress actually is, and who gets to be celebrated for transgressive moments like this – particularly when members of the queer community do the same thing on the daily and often face repercussions for doing so. Read more on that here and see the post below.