A fashion designer friend once told me that a slogan T-shirt is the most accessible entry point into fashion, something Harry Styles and his stylist, Harry Lambert, seem to acutely understand. Consider some recent high-fashion success stories: There was Jonathan Anderson’s “I Told Ya” shirt, first made for Challengers then sold through Loewe, or Conner Ives’s ultra-viral, moment-defining “Protect the Dolls” top first shown on the runway in London in February of last year, after which it took over the internet and then wardrobes of celebrities including Troye Sivan, Pedro Pascal, Tilda Swinton, and more.
Enter Patrick Carroll, a 35-year-old multi-hyphenate living in Los Angeles. Carroll, who grew up in the Bay Area and spent his 20s in New York before returning to California to establish his practice as an artist, was enlisted by Lambert late last year to create a run of tees for Styles for what was then an undisclosed project. He discovered, at the same time as the rest of the world, that Styles was wearing one of the tees in the cover of his much-anticipated fourth solo album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. The shirt Styles is wearing has that title emblazoned across its chest.
A week after the announcement of the album and just hours after the release of its first single, “Aperture,” Carroll spoke with Vanity Fair about his art practice, his work for Styles, and his upcoming debut novel.
Harry Styles in a tee by Patrick Carroll for the cover of his latest album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.
Columbia Records / © 2026 Sony Music Entertainment
“Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally”
Courtesy of Patrick Carroll
“Kiss All the Time”
Courtesy of Patrick Carroll
How are you? I’m sure you’ve been having quite a week.
It’s been funny. I had no idea that it was happening! Harry Lambert reached out in October to commission a few shirts. I knew they were for Harry Styles, and he gave me the language.
You must have signed a million NDAs!
Just one [laughs]. And then I talked to Harry Lambert again like a month later and he told me they’d done some photographs, and that one of them was going to be used for something very special. He couldn’t tell me what it was, and I had the slightest inkling, but did not know until Thursday when I saw the post on Instagram. The album cover was my first post when I opened Instagram. I literally had no actual clue.
How did that feel?
I don’t know [laughs]. It’s basically just very fun and delightful. I’m just fielding the response now.
What is that like? Have you gotten a ton of orders? A colleague of mine said she was going to order one.
I got a lot of people messaging me and I don’t have many clothes available right now, so I’m spending the morning working on my book and then in the afternoon going to the studio and making clothes to get more inventory and meet the moment!
Patrick Carroll trying on a t-shirt he made for Harry Styles.
Courtesy of Patrick Carroll
Patrick Carroll
Courtesy of Patrick Carroll
Right. You recently sold your first novel. What can you share about it?
Yes. The main focus of my attention right now is revising this book! I wrote the first draft of it when I was doing my MFA [Master of Fine Arts] in fiction writing [at the University of California, Riverside], which is also where I was when I first got this knitting machine and taught myself the craft. It was kind of a pandemic moment, working on both of these things. I was making a new garment every day, and then taking myself to bed with a pad of paper and pen.
It’s loosely autobiographical. While I was at school in this program, I would also go up to the Bay Area, where I’m from, because my dad had a neurodegenerative illness. He was at the end of his life, and I was helping him and my family more broadly. He wound up doing physician assisted suicide a few weeks before the [COVID-19] shutdown, so the book is a novelization of this process. Helping a parent through illness and death, meanwhile, it has some aspects of the knitting and the art-making, and it’s very much a gay-guy-in-his-20s romp of a book too.
