Our beloved Harry Styles is in the news because he was minding his business and Billy Porter got salty about it.
I’m mostly joking. I don’t really care that much about Harry Styles (even though! his albums are immaculate), but it’s unfortunate that this necessary conversation has to happen at his expense. Harry Styles is just doing Harry Styles. He doesn’t bother anybody, he’s nice to everybody, and he just wears his little outfits. The praise he receives for those outfits is hyperbolic in relation to any ground that he’s actually breaking, because he’s not doing anything that scores of musicians haven’t done before him. I did not now for sure that Boy George was a man when I was a child. That is groundbreaking non-binary presentation in popular entertainment, not Harry Styles putting on a dress.
Harry Styles has the enormous privilege of being a straight, white, cis male sex symbol who was in a boy band. Anything he does that is counter to what that mold would typically do is going to receive way more praise than that same event would garner if performed by anyone else. That is what Billy Porter is trying to say in this interview with The Sunday Times.
“I feel like the fashion industry has accepted me because they have to. I created the conversation (about non-binary fashion) and yet Vogue still put Harry Styles, a straight white man, in a dress on their cover for the first time…I was the first one doing it and now everybody is doing it. I’m not dragging Harry Styles, but… He doesn’t care, he’s just doing it because it’s the thing to do. This is politics for me. This is my life…I had to fight my entire life to get to the place where I could wear a dress to the Oscars. All (Styles) has to do is be white and straight.”
Billy Porter is absolutely right. All Harry had to do is be white and be straight, but let’s not make assumptions about what he does and does not care about. Harry himself has said that he’s always liked “fancy dress” from a young kid and his sister, eyewear designer Gemma Styles, says their mother used to dress them both up, but Harry was the one who actually liked it. Harry’s philosophy on style is the same one I have:
“You can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”
Is Harry Styles non-binary? No. But gender shouldn’t be boiled down to what clothes you wear, because clothes don’t have a gender. They’re just clothes. I am not non-binary, but I’ve been doing my nails and wearing heels off and on since high school.
That said, I didn’t know who Billy Porter was in high school. I didn’t put on “girls’ clothes” because Billy Porter made it okay to do so. I didn’t realize men could wear “women’s clothes” because Billy Porter opened the door for me. Billy Porter’s ego has erased all of the people who opened the door for him to wear his outfits of varying taste level on a red carpet.
Andre Leon Talley’s shiny muumuus and dramatic capes paved the way for Billy Porter.
B. Scott suing BET for being forced to take their make-up off and sport a ponytail to report on the runway paved the way for Billy Porter.
Miss Jay’s bobs and heels and ruffles on primetime television for ten years paved the way for Billy Porter.
And those are just the ones Iidentified with. That’s not even touching on Prince’s assless yellow lace awards show performance or Sylvester telling us we don’t have to take our clothes off to have a good time or Andre J being the first man in a dress on the cover of a high fashion magazine.
I Am The First Man to appear on Vogue Paris circa 2007. I set the tone for today’s fashion/gender fluidity on HIGH FASHION MAGAZINE COVERS. A Black Man did it before Harry Styles. Billy should do more research also pic.twitter.com/LoZrZ54eD7
— Andre J The Urban Mystic (@AndreJWorldWide) October 19, 2021
This is a lesson in ego muddying your point. You can have the most valid point of view in the word and initiate an overdue conversation that we probably should be having, but if you center yourself, a big chunk of your audience is going to bypass the conversation altogether. Very few people are actually breaking new ground. It is 2021. Somebody came before you. Somebody laid the cobblestones for the path you walk.
Harry Styles is the latest in a long line of glam rockers pushing the boundaries of masculinity. Billy Porter is the latest in a long line of blurred gender lines in fashion. Just because Billy Porter thinks he deserves a Vogue cover doesn’t mean his point is completely off the mark, but he’s not the pioneer he thinks he is.
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