The year 2026 is expected to be Harry Styles’ boldest year yet!
The Summer Of Styles Is Here! Is this the star’s boldest year yet?
‘Harry, you’d go for a beer with.’ So read a One Direction profile back in 2014, when Harry Styles was still in the band and Donald Trump was just a man on reality TV. A different, simpler time, but that line stuck. Styles was the one who had not only the charisma and sass, but also, crucially, relatability. For all the varied appeals of his bandmates, everyone knew Styles was the star because you simply cannot design someone like that. He has always seemed so natural; a man entirely at ease who, this year, has marched to the beat of his own weird drum more than ever before.
Styles has been famous for half his life – he was 16 when he auditioned for The X Factor and is 32 now, having to grow from boy to man in a spotlight reserved for very few. He’s become part of an extraordinary coterie of Brits called Harry who define this country, from Kane to Potter, but Styles towers above them all in his impact on culture and society, plus his domination of column inches and social media posts. His life and loves feel responsible for an entire gossip industry, while his stats – 47 million followers on Instagram; 68 million on Spotify – are so big he has attained that rarified height from which it is impossible to fall.
This year, however, has felt different – his boldest yet. This month, he takes over Wembley Stadium for 12 nights (Oasis did seven, Coldplay 10) with a tour, Together Together, that will later move to New York’s Madison Square Gardens for a whopping 30 show run. That is Styles at his maximum but, as well as that largess, it has conversely, somehow, been a year in which the popstar has been at his most small. Despite his imminent takeover of enormous venues, Styles has morphed from nation’s sweetheart to national-hero-in-waiting by doing what the very best, hugely successful British popstars have always done – which is to, quite frankly, become a bit odd.
The Beatles did it, in India with their masses of hair. David Bowie seemed to do it every week. Now Styles has leant into the strange too – a thrilling moment in which stratospheric acts take full control and lead their fans to more interesting places than a record label wants; realising that, really, what is the point in being absurdly famous if you cannot do it on your own terms?
‘Something I’ve often struggled with in the middle of a tour is feeling like I’m not sure what I’m adding to the world,’ said Styles in an interview earlier this year. ‘The adulation you can receive feels so loud. Like, clearly I’m getting so much from this, all this energy. People give me so much, which I deeply appreciate. But what am I contributing? At times I felt quite existential about that.’
The result of this restlessness began in January, with the release of Aperture, Styles’ first song in three years and a deeply moody comeback for an artist whose biggest hit to date was the indelible synth-pop wonder As It Was. Then came the new album, Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally – a title that hails from a different language to his first three records and mostly showed that Styles has spent a long time listening to dance titans LCD Soundsystem, making music for people who like a late night out in a warehouse and need something to listen to when they get home at 7am. Interview-wise, Styles further dodged convention, opting for a conversation about marathons with the surrealist novelist Haruki Murakami in Runner’s World.
And now, he takes over London. As well as Wembley, he’s curating the music festival Meltdown, which provides the real insight into who Styles is right now. Previous artists honoured with picking who can play at the Southbank Centre for a week include Bowie and Grace Jones; so this is a seismic honour for a person discovered by the distinctly anti-art Simon Cowell.
Like a man insistent on making a niche mixtape for a new girlfriend, nobody who Styles has picked for the festival – say, Ninajirachi, Erika de Casier, Stephen Fretwell – are household names, but who better than the second biggest popstar of the era (all hail Taylor Swift) to boost some underdog’s streaming numbers and, at the same time, help himself? He’s letting the world know that he is serious because he wants to be taken seriously.
‘We live in a time when making an effort can be considered uncool,’ he told Runner’s World, while quite clearly making as much effort as one possibly can. A singer who, from running marathons to spending his spare time travelling around Japan, Italy, Spain and Germany, hitting the latter’s club scene night after night and making art out of his comfort zone.
The clues were always there. At secondary school in Cheshire, the young Styles formed a band, White Eskimo, and videos online show them taking on classics from Summer of ’69 to A Hard Day’s Night, but playing them harder, faster and on edge. At one gig, White Eskimo play their own song, Gone In A Week, and it is less like the boyband Styles was about to join, more the pop-punk of Sum 41.
The key word is curiosity, which is what everyone with a legacy needs to stand out from the rest. What other Millennial popstar, for example, has gifted their time to making us happy in the way that Styles has with his Pleasing company and its range of vibrators and lube? Who else with stadiums to fill has appeared in films as vast as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and titchy as queer indie My Policeman – not to mention the 1950s psycho-sexual thriller Don’t Worry Darling?
But Styles has always known pop is only partly about music – his X Factor audition was good, if not startling, but Cowell recognised what lay beneath. After all, a star’s entire being and body adds to their art – hence Styles’ 60-odd tattoos and frequent excursions into gender-fluid dressing.
Fashion-wise, experimentation is nothing new for him. While most teenagers turned up to the X Factor auditions in shirt and trousers from Next, Styles had his hair long and loose, in light scarf and cardigan, low T-shirt and a lot of scraggly bits around his wrists. He was working in a bakery at the time. His work with stylist and friend Harry Lambert has only pushed boundaries he was already reaching for.
‘I’ve been asked, “Is your work political?”’ Lambert told GQ magazine, about Styles’ flirtation with feminine fashion. ‘Not really. Playing with gender stereotypes shouldn’t matter; if something political comes of it, or it makes someone feel more comfortable, then great. If it pisses someone off? Great, whatever.’
Crucially, it is all distraction, with Styles’ greatest trick being to lure attention away from what he does not want to talk about. For a star who has dated Taylor Swift and Olivia Wilde and is now apparently engaged to Zoë Kravitz, it says a lot about his career that there was no need to mention these famous women until now. But Styles has managed this – by keeping us asking questions, he keeps control of the answers.
Sometimes, though, he lets his guard down. Who knows how much of Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally and everything that came with it was completed before his bandmate and friend Liam Payne died in October 2024, but when he spoke to Zane Lowe about his death earlier this year, so much of where Styles is now seems to have stemmed from his grief. ‘It was a really important moment for me,’ he said of the loss. ‘In terms of taking a look at my life and being able to say, “OK, what do I want to do with my life? How do I want to live?” And I think the greatest way you can honour your friends who pass away is by living your life to the fullest.’
