Harry Styles Is Bringing Back the Flash Mob
The pop star dropped a raunchy music video for “Dance No More”
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
Harry Styles has always understood the assignment — but with his new music video for "Dance No More," he's gone full maximalist and somehow made it work. Styled in white Celine high-tops (from Michael Rider's debut collection), shiny red short-shorts, and a yellow-blue striped tie, Styles struts around a gymnasium like he invented the concept of being looked at. He licks his microphone. He swings it from his hips. The crowd, naturally, loses its mind.
What starts as a seduction sequence tips into something oddly sentimental: the audience begins moving in unison, swaying in their seats before being — literally — pulled into a dance circle around him. It's a flash mob. A full, sincere, completely unironic flash mob, and according to Harper's Bazaar, director Colin Solal Cardo (the same person behind Robyn's "Ever Again" and Charli XCX's "White Mercedes") is the one steering the nostalgia. Some three dozen dancers hit the floor in synchronized choreography, intercut with aggressive make-out sessions — a recurring motif across all promotion for the album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, which, in fairness, tells you everything in the title.
The Shorts Are a Whole Thing
"Dance No More" is the third single from the album, and by now a pattern has emerged: Styles in extremely short gym shorts, layered with button-downs, ties, and the quiet confidence of a man who runs marathons and knows it. In "American Girls," he cycles through both black and daffodil yellow pairs. The first single, "Aperture," skips the shorts but still finds a way to work in choreography — a two-person flash mob between Styles and his on-screen stalker inside a hotel. As aesthetics go, it's chaotic, committed, and oddly cohesive.
The timing is deliberate: the video drops one week before his Together, Together tour kicks off in Amsterdam on May 16, followed by a 30-show residency at Madison Square Garden in the fall. That's a significant amount of real estate for a man who has apparently decided that the flash mob — long consigned to 2009 YouTube and a few ill-fated mall proposals — deserves a second life. And honestly? The argument is more convincing than it has any right to be.
The flash mob is back, and Harry Styles is the only person who could have made that sentence feel exciting rather than embarrassing.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
