Treat people with kindness! Harry Styles clapped back at Candace Owens after the conservative author criticized him for wearing a dress on his historic Vogue cover.
“Bring back manly men,” the Grammy nominee, 26, wrote via Instagram on Wednesday, December 2, alongside a photo of him eating a banana in a frilly pale blue suit.
Styles also discussed the drama in Variety’s Hitmakers issue, which was published on Wednesday and named him Hitmaker of the Year.
“To not wear [something] because it’s females’ clothing, you shut out a whole world of great clothes,” he said. “And I think what’s exciting about right now is you can wear what you like. It doesn’t have to be X or Y. Those lines are becoming more and more blurred.”
The “Watermelon Sugar” singer’s response came weeks after he became the first-ever man to appear solo on the cover of Vogue. For the December 2020 issue — which quickly sold out across the country, forcing the fashion magazine to order a second print run — he wore a white Gucci ball gown underneath a dark blazer. The cover declared that he “makes his own rules.”
While many fans applauded Styles for breaking barriers, Owens, 31, slammed his cover via Twitter and urged “manly men” to make a return.
“There is no society that can survive without strong men,” she tweeted on November 14. “The East knows this. In the west, the steady feminization of our men at the same time that Marxism is being taught to our children is not a coincidence. It is an outright attack.”
The political commentator received major backlash for her remarks, with Zach Braff, Kathy Griffin and Olivia Wilde rushing to the former One Direction member’s defense.
“Our whole lives boys and men are told we need to be manly,” Braff, 45, tweeted. “Life is short. Be whatever the f–k you want to be.”
Wilde, 36, who is directing Styles in the upcoming movie Don’t Worry Darling, called Owens “pathetic,” while Griffin, 60, tweeted, “Candy Owens doesn’t know what she in for going up against the Harry Styles stans.”
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