Before he was the first man to appear solo on the cover of American Vogue, Harry Edward Styles was a teenager working the register at the W Mandeville Bakery in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire—a village so small that when fans started showing up by the thousands a decade later, the local council had to hire tour guides to manage them. Born Feb. 1, 1994, in Redditch, Worcestershire, Styles grew up singing lead in a school band called White Eskimo. At 16, his mother signed him up for The X Factor without telling him.
The audition—Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” April 2010—didn’t go as planned. Styles failed as a solo act but was grouped with four other eliminated contestants to form One Direction, a name he suggested. They finished third, then sold 70 million records, became the first group in Billboard 200 history to have their first four albums debut at No. 1 and turned Styles into the most scrutinized face in pop music before he could legally drink.
When the band went on hiatus in 2016, he didn’t retreat. His self-titled debut hit No. 1 in both the U.S. and the U.K. in 2017. His sophomore album, Fine Line (2019), broke the record for the biggest first-week sales by an English male artist on the Billboard 200. Harry’s House (2022) won Album of the Year at the Grammys, winning over Beyoncé, Adele and Bad Bunny. Love on Tour became the fifth-highest-grossing concert tour in history. Along the way, styled by longtime collaborator Harry Lambert, he co-chaired the Met Gala in a sheer Gucci jumpsuit and a single pearl earring, put a periwinkle Gucci dress on the cover of Vogue, launched a global crochet craze with a JW Anderson cardigan and made the pearl a menswear staple. His fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, arrives March 6, followed by a 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden beginning in August—his only U.S. stop and twice the length of the 2022 run that earned him a permanent banner in the arena’s rafters.