Subheading: I Care That he Wears Ugly Skirts
I'll be honest, the title of this intrigued me and the subtitle reeled me in. The first 3/4 of the article covers complaints LGBT+ have complained about famous straight men wearing skirts. I'm not going to wade into that issue as I don't have any skin in the game. I'm really just wanting to be - as the author writes "A man wearing a skirt once to be photographed for – and I cannot emphasize this enough – Vogue magazine, and a man wearing a skirt to the convenience store, because that’s the way he wants to dress, are totally different."
The requisite section from the article - which finally - finally someone has articulated my thoughts re: Harry Styles:
Dear reader, I now beg your one last indulgence. Because I have one more point I’d like to make about Harry Styles, and it’s not very consequential. It’s actually pretty petty. It’s nowhere near as important as the harm he is doing to real marginalized groups, and I recognize this, but I’ve been dying to say this somewhere. And is it not my right as a gay person to complain about fashion? If Harry Styles is going to stereotype me, then a stereotype I shall be.
Here’s the thing: his clothes are ugly as sin. To be clear, this is my subjective opinion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and, unlike the other things I discussed here, this has no moral component and is simply a matter of taste. But holy ****, dude. Maybe I’d care less that he was making such a big deal out of wearing a dress if he were capable of matching two garments together, but he’s not. And don’t even get me started on his weird little boob-window lederhosen sequined pantsuits that he seems so fond of.
They’re just…ugly. It looks bad. Honestly, if there’s any indication to me that this man is straight, it’s the way he dresses. He chooses clothes like someone who has done a whole bunch of reading on camp and can recite whole paragraphs but still hasn’t grasped the fundamental idea of camp in a way that he can enact. He lacks imagination, maybe. I don’t know. Whatever it is, he knows how to be queer on paper only, and when he brings his studies out into the real world, it looks tacky and performative.