November 17, 2020
Celebs Defend Harry Styles Wearing Dress for Vogue, Twitter Reacts
READ TIME: 2 MIN.
Harry Styles wearing a dress on the latest cover of Vogue has the internet divided.
After conservative pundits like Candice Owens took issue with the singer's look for the fashion magazine, a number of celebrities defended Styles and his clothing. Actor and "Booksmart" director Olivia Wilde, who is working with the former One Direction star on her new film, tweeted that Owens is "pathetic." Meanwhile, "The Good Place" star Jameela Jamil also came to Styles' defense.
Owens wasn't the only right-wing pundit to make remarks about Styles. Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson fired off tweets criticizing the publication for their cover.
But the cover also became a talking point on Twitter with some upset that a cis straight man broke the barrier for Vogue as Styles became the first man to be featured solo on a cover, which was shot by Tyler Mitchell. Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender non-conforming performance artist and author of "Beyond the Gender Binary," opened up about her feelings in an Instagram post, Insider reports.
"Am I happy to see Harry be celebrated for openly flouting gendered fashion norms? Yes. Do trans femmes of color receive praise for doing the same thing every day? No," they wrote. "Do I think this is a sign of progress of society's evolution away from binary gender? Yes. Do I think that white men should be upheld as the face of gender-neutral fashion? No."
"Make no mistake: trans femmes of color started this and continue to face the backlash from it," Vaid-Menon continued. "Our aesthetics make it to the mainstream, but not our bodies. We are still dismissed as 'too much' and 'too queer' because we aren't palatable enough to whiteness and heteronormativity."
"Is that Harry's fault? No. It's the fault of systems of transmisogyny and racism."
Find other responses from Twitter below.