Gay men in suits
Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for SOLT ‘We thought: “Let’s do something that most people aren’t going to get”’ … Emma Corrin at the Olivier awards in April. By the early 70s, the studio system was over, so stars dressed themselves, which didn’t always go well (Google any Oscars ceremony in the 1980s). In Hollywood’s golden age – Lambert’s favourite era – actors were styled by costume designers from the studios. He’s wearing wide-legged Marni trousers in chequerboard brown, large black pearls and a T-shirt lightly stained with breakfast.Ĭelebrity stylists are relatively new. Lambert, 35, is warm and chatty, with a gentle East Anglian accent and short bleached hair. In one room, platform shoes spill out of an Ikea Kallax unit. We’re sitting on a bench in the communal garden behind his two-room studio in Hoxton, east London. I’m aware that what I do is having an impact, but is that top of the agenda for me? No.”
“If you look at pop icons over the years, fashion is such an integral part of their image, like Björk in the swan dress, Britney in the schoolgirl outfit.
Not that that’s how he sees it: “Look, when it comes to this, I wish I could be all: ‘I wanted to change the world!’ But it’s more that it’s a byproduct of what we’re doing,” he says. Lambert has been central to this, a sort of Thomas Cromwell to Styles’s Henry VIII, but dissolving binaries instead of monasteries. From the sheer black blouse and single pearl earring at the 2019 Met Gala, to the tight crimson Arturo Obegero jumpsuit in the video to As It Was, Styles became mainstream pop’s most determined subverter of gender stereotypes. Photograph: Theo Wargo/Getty Images for HS Styles performs in New York City in 2021. Rumours of a solo career were circulating, and Styles was going through his “Jagger period”, wearing black Saint Laurent suits, Chelsea boots and leonine hair tamed by bright bandanas – fashion filtered through NME rather than GQ. Harry met Harry around the time of One Direction’s 2014 album, Four. It’s an intimate space! I’m aware that a lot of the attention I get is because of him, but I want to be very careful. I’m often the last person they see before they go on stage. You have to remember I am there in the most intimate times with people I work with. “When it comes to questions about Harry, I just consider our relationship too private to go too deep. Getting him to talk about Styles is like getting blood from a stone. W alking down the narrow corridor towards stylist Harry Lambert’s studio, I can’t be the first person to wonder if Harry Styles – Lambert’s most famous client – has trod the same blue carpet.