Actor Billy Porter slammed Vogue for featuring pop star Harry Styles in a dress on the cover of its magazine, claiming that he was the actual trailblazer for men wearing dresses, and had to “fight” his “entire life” to be able to wear a dress at the Oscars. Porter suggested Styles was featured on Vogue because he is “white and straight.”
“I changed the whole game I. Personally. Changed. The. Whole. Game,” Porter said in a recent interview with the Sunday Times’ Style magazine. “And that is not ego, that is just fact,” the Cinderella actor added. “I was the first one doing it and now everybody is doing it.”
In 2019, Porter turned heads and made headlines when he showed up to the Academy Awards red carpet in a custom tuxedo dress by Christian Siriano.
When asked if he feels he has been fully accepted by the fashion industry, Porter said, “I feel like the fashion industry has accepted me because they have to.”
“I’m not necessarily convinced and here is why,” The Twilight Zone actor continued. “I created the conversation [about non-binary fashion] and yet Vogue still put Harry Styles, a straight white man, in a dress on their cover for the first time.”
Porter went on to claim that he has had to “fight” his “entire life” to be able to wear a dress at the Oscars, and suggested that Styles got to be featured on the Vogue cover simply because he is “white and straight.”
“I’m not dragging Harry Styles, but he is the one you’re going to try and use to represent this new conversation? He doesn’t care, he’s just doing it because it’s the thing to do,” he said. “This is politics for me. This is my life. I had to fight my entire life to get to the place where I could wear a dress to the Oscars and not be gunned now. All he has to do is be white and straight.”
Last year, Styles posed for Vogue as the first solo male cover star in the fashion magazine’s history — wearing women’s clothing.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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