Short shorts, shirts and ties and high-top trainers have been the fashion headlines from Harry Styles’s Together, Together tour. But, depending on your propensity for ’80s-leaning office attire, the sneakers are the most straightforward trend to take from his winning Wembley streak. Specifically, Harry’s Dries Van Noten sneakers.
The “Sign of the Times” singer, by way of stylist Harry Lambert, has developed a taste for the Belgian brand’s heavyweight viscose satin runners, inspired by the slimline styles worn by marathon sprinters in the ’70s – apt considering Styles has been known to run to Wembley from his Hampstead home. Worn with fresh white ribbed sports socks pulled up and a rotation of boxer-length shorts from Charles Jeffrey and Marc Jacobs, the slimline kicks ground Harry’s off-kilter stagewear in a retro athleticism.
Styles’s step away from his once-beloved Adidas Samba Decons and Gazelles is in line with the wider men’s shoe shift towards flat, featherweight styles, like the Prada Collapse (which edges into sneakerina territory), and high-top torpedo styles are a natural evolution of this. Celine, the instigator of the current jazz shoe movement, even fashioned Styles a high-rise version of its popular leather-trimmed skinny shoes for his One Night Only Manchester performance. The response was so positive, the brand has promised to put them in stores.
For a Midlands lad who came of age in the era of skinny jeans, high-top trainers – specifically Converse – were once as essential as drainpipe denim. Anyone who also subscribed to the Chuck Taylor club will know that a Con habit was hard to kick because, once worn in, they became moulded to one’s feet and looked better with every Glasto trip. It was once completely inconceivable that we’d ever consider wearing another trainer type. (Grace Wales Bonner has a lot to answer for.)
