Image: Fred Duval (via Shutterstock)
Harryween is back, and this year Harry Styles went all the way back to the beginning.
On Friday, October 30, Styles played the 29th night of his 30-show Together, Together residency at Madison Square Garden in New York. It was the first of two Halloween-themed shows closing out the run. He opened the night as Elvis Presley, in a flared white jumpsuit, a blue satin-lined cape and gold sunglasses. His band and dancers dressed as different versions of Styles from across his career. Riley Keough, Presley’s granddaughter, was in the crowd.
The nod to Elvis has a backstory: the first song Styles ever recorded was a cover of Presley’s “The Girl of My Best Friend.”
The moment that sent fans spiralling came later. Styles returned in a near-exact copy of the outfit he wore to his X Factor audition in 2010, at 16: a grey cardigan, a white T-shirt, a scarf, brown trousers and the contestant number 165998 pinned to his chest. Then he sang “Isn’t She Lovely,” the Stevie Wonder song that took him through to the next round.
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He even revived one of the most quoted lines from that audition, telling the arena: “I work in a bakery.” As a teenager, Styles had a part-time job at a bakery in Holmes Chapel.
Extended footage released by The X Factor in 2022 showed that Styles first sang Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” for the judges. Simon Cowell then asked to hear him without a backing track, and he sang “Isn’t She Lovely” a cappella. That audition put him on the path to One Direction, alongside Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik and Liam Payne.
The Halloween show tradition started in 2021, when Styles dressed as Dorothy to sing “Over the Rainbow” and as a clown to cover Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” In 2022, at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, he sang “Hopelessly Devoted to You” as Danny Zuko.
The MSG residency drew a record 11.5 million presale registrations on Ticketmaster. Earlier in the week, on October 28, Styles also played “Ever Since New York” for the first time in four years.
The final Harryween night, and the last date of the residency, takes place on Halloween. Fans already have one question: how is he going to top this?
