People PEOPLE Harry Styles

‘IN THIS WORLD, IT’S JUST US, YOU KNOW IT’S NOT THE SAME AS IT WAS’—HARRY STYLES, ‘AS IT WAS’ HARRY STYLES: HIS MUSIC, MOVIES & MORE FROM X FACTOR TO ONE DIRECTION TO TODAY • HIS BEST LOOKS: REAL LIFE, RED CARPET AND HARRYWEEN PLUS WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE SUPERSTAR…

WHEN HARRY STYLES stepped onto the stage of The X Factor in 2017—his first time back on the show since the breakup of One Direction—the dapper pop idol tore through a raucous rendition of his coming-of-age anthem “Kiwi,” which chronicles one man’s obsession with a girl who loves hard liquor and cheap cigarettes. It was a far cry from the baby-faced Styles, who dominated the X Factor airwaves with his boy band One Direction just a few years before but a refreshing evolution for this new King of Pop nonetheless. Said Styles: “It’s good to be back.” His return to the venue that made him famous was a victorious one, but Styles hasn’t been one to wallow in his own nostalgia. In the past five years, he’s come to embody a…

THE MUSIC BUG BIT HIM EARLY. But it wasn’t merely while listening to late-’90s radio as a lad in Northern England. As Harry Styles tells it, his initial exposure to the art form came courtesy of entertainment royalty from a bygone era: the King. “The first music I ever heard was Elvis Presley,” Styles recalled to Rolling Stone in 2019. “When I was little, we got a karaoke machine, and I sang Elvis, because that’s what my grandparents listened to.” The influence of Presley on Styles was so great, in fact, that he even developed his own impersonation, which helped to combat his own stage fright. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” his sister Gemma told Vogue in 2020. “He would sing in the bathroom,…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010 HARRY STYLES, then 16, went to Manchester to audition for the seventh season of The X Factor—the U.K.’s biggest music-talent competition show. He had high hopes for making it far in the contest—the group he sang in with his schoolmates, White Eskimo, had already won a battle of the bands. And yet, when asked his plans for college, Styles told judge Simon Cowell that he would study “law, sociology and business.” He then sang an a cappella version of “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder and, despite not impressing one of the three judges (talent agent Louis Walsh, likely now kicking himself), was put through by Cowell and guest judge Nicole Scherzinger. But in the bootcamp round that followed, Styles was cut and left the stage…

THE CALL FROM STEVIE NICKS came one night in 2019. The rock legend was in London for a string of shows and wanted to grab some dinner with her pal Harry Styles. He had inducted Nicks into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that year—and Nicks, who found solo stardom outside of her work with Fleetwood Mac, would often counsel the former One Direction singer on navigating his career. When Nicks told Styles she wanted to hear material from his just-finished second album, Fine Line, he was surprised: “I’d never really played her [my] stuff before,” he told The Howard Stern Show in 2020. With some trepidation, Styles took Nicks and her friends back to his apartment, where they listened to his new tunes until the wee hours. “They left…

‘HE’S THE TYPE OF PERSON YOU’D WANT TO LIVE NEXT DOOR TO. HE’D LOOK OUT THE WINDOW, SEE YOU HAVING A HARD TIME PLANTING FLOWERS AND RUSH OUT ASKING, “CAN I HELP YOU WITH THOSE ROSES?”’—STEVIE NICKS, ON HER FRIEND STYLES He may be a millennial superstar, but he’s an old soul down deep. Since coming into his own, post-One Direction, Harry Styles has taken musical and style cues from music forces of yore, from low-key singer-songwriters like Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell to flamboyant icons like Prince and David Bowie. “A lot of my influences and the stuff that I love is older,” Styles told Rolling Stone of his grab-bag of inspirations. “But I’m not saying I wish I lived back then. I wanted to [make music] that sounds like…