Harry Styles channels his expressive emotionality to play with the meaning of masculinity in the campaign of the Gucci HA HA HA collection, which the British singer-songwriter and actor envisioned together with Creative Director Alessandro Michele. Clothes are put on, paired with surprising accessories, then cast aside and piled up in a game of dress-up that neither establishes nor recounts classic preconceptions, but rather recasts the men’s wardrobe as a tool for the avant-garde.
It’s Harry’s House, and we’re all just living in it. Today brings a new look at the HA HA HA collection designed by Harry Styles and Gucci (plus a mess of behind-the-scenes photos from the campaign shoot shared exclusively with GQ). Styles and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele have dreamt up many ways to describe this collection: it’s the result of the two playing like kids, it’s their dream wardrobe designed through WhatsApp and over glasses of wine, and “it’s more about life,” Michele said during the presentation of the collection back in June. Either way, what’s evident is that the clothes that Styles models in this new campaign are killer.
The new HA HA HA campaign is an extension of the years-long project Styles and Gucci have been organically working towards for years: an effort to tip us closer towards “masculine transformation,” said a press release from the brand. What started as Styles embracing his role as one of Michele’s muses and wearing a custom Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue is culminating in this collaboration. “I’m so happy to see this project finally come to life,” Styles said in a statement. “I’ve known Alessandro for years now, and he’s always been one of my favorite people. I’m always inspired watching him work, so doing this collaboration with my friend was very special to me.”
In the campaign, Styles is having a lot of fun: he poses next to a slender tree wearing a checked Prince of Wales coat, discovers a chair in a pinstriped suit, languishes against a couch wearing a double-breasted jacket and flared trousers in pale shades of plum and teal, and finds time to sit on a mountain of clothes from the collection while wearing a yellow checkered suit dotted with cherries. The campaign also highlights graphic tees with stern cartoon bears, patchwork leather jackets, and serious tailoring, while Styles’s painted nails are ever present. Styles is almost always carrying a purse, too: the Gucci Bamboo 1947, which “embeds within the narrative like a beacon of the renewal of the masculine world,” the press release said. Whatever it is, Styles makes you want one.
The suits in the collection, meanwhile, are classic Styles: big and ‘70s inspired with free-flowing flared pants. “I put on [Harry] a lot of suits for years and years,” Michele said in June. “And he was the most eccentric and free guy on earth.” Styles’s fashion inspiration lies in the rock gods who came to prominence in the ‘70s. “We were sharing for a long time images of eccentric men from the era,” Michele said. “And so we went really close to the things that are very difficult to find in vintage, or things that apparently belong to an era that, in a way, doesn’t exist anymore.”
One thing that’s striking about the collection, and a way it departs from Gucci’s other popular collaborations with brands like The North Face and Palace, is the lack of the Italian label’s signature logomania. There is hardly a logo, insignia, or the word “Gucci” in sight. And why would you need one?The HA HA HA collection’s tailoring, colors, and playful pajamas ooze with an unmistakable Gucciness—a quality clearly shaped and influenced by Styles.
Watch Harry Styles: Apple Music Live.
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Behind the scenes of Styles’s campaign shoot
See the full campaign below and sign up to stay updated on the release of the HA HA HA collection on Gucci’s website.
