Harry Styles Revives His ‘X Factor’ Audition Look for ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ at Harryween
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 30: Harry Styles performs onstage at Harry Styles "Harryween" Fancy Dress Party at Madison Square Garden on October 30, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for HS) Getty Images for HS
Harry Styles went back to where it all started for Harryween.
At Madison Square Garden on Friday (Oct. 30), the 29th night of his 30-show Together, Together residency, Styles changed into the outfit he wore for his 2010 X Factor audition and performed Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” the song that got him through to the next round at 16. He even repeated a line from that day, telling the crowd, “I work in a bakery,” a nod to the part-time job he held in his Cheshire hometown of Holmes Chapel.
The audition outfit was a mid-show swap. Styles opened the night dressed as Elvis Presley, while his band and dancers came as different versions of Styles from across his career. The Elvis nod tracks: the first song Styles ever recorded was a cover of Presley’s “The Girl of My Best Friend.”
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On the audition itself, “Isn’t She Lovely” wasn’t Styles’ first pick. Footage released by the show in 2022 revealed he opened with Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister,” and only sang the Wonder song a cappella after Simon Cowell asked to hear him without a backing track. He was later placed in One Direction alongside Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik and the late Liam Payne. Earlier this month, Styles debuted “What Is Enough,” a song written for Payne, at the same venue on the second anniversary of Payne’s death.
Costumed covers have become a Harryween tradition. At the first edition, at MSG in 2021, Styles dressed as Dorothy to sing “Over the Rainbow,” then came out as a clown the next night to cover Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” In 2022, at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, he dressed as Grease’s Danny Zuko for “Hopelessly Devoted to You.”
The residency wraps Saturday (Oct. 31) with a final Harryween show. The MSG run drew a record 11.5 million presale registrations on Ticketmaster. Styles has sent all four of his solo albums to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, most recently Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. in March, and has topped the Hot 100 three times: “Watermelon Sugar” in 2020, “As It Was” in 2022 (15 weeks at No. 1, the longest run atop the chart by a U.K. act) and “Aperture” this year.
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