now smell this

Harry Styles Thinks He Smells Like Joan Didion’s House

But what does Joan Didion’s house smell like? Photo: Getty Images

The mystery of Harry Styles’s musk has finally been solved: By his own estimation, the 25-year-old singer-slash-perfume-slinger smells like your favorite writer’s house, or hopes to. Not “flashy mango,” not stale stage sweat, but a famous stranger’s home. But which one, you ask? Well!

Speaking with Dazed Beauty about the launch of Gucci’s first universal fragrance, Mémoire d’une Odeur, Styles offered this oddly specific comparison: “It smells like what I imagine Joan Didion’s house to smell like,” he said of the scent, which he reportedly wears “all the time,” even to bed.

It’s an answer that raises its own raft of questions. Chiefly, what does Joan Didion’s house smell like, fried chicken? The morning after a tequila-soaked party with rocker types? And which house, are we talking Hollywood or Sacramento or Malibu or New York? For surely a home that looks out over the sea smells differently than an apartment that, at least sometimes, looks out over hot trash. But also, and maybe most of all, What?

In Styles’s mind, Didion’s house probably smells “really fresh” — “floral, clean, not heavy.” Meanwhile, Gucci describes Memoire d’une Odeur as a blend of Roman chamomile and Indian coral jasmine, which together “establish a new olfactive family, Mineral Aromatic.” Does that clear things up for you? No? Maybe it will help to watch the campaign film, a sort of ’60s-inspired dream sequence in which fancy free spirits dance around in pastoral ruins, definitely not looking the slightest bit cult-y.

Anyway, to sum up, Harry Styles also reads Joan Didion, and here’s hoping that, next time Gucci enlists Styles to sell a fragrance, said scent will smell like the inside of his BFF’s shawl vault. Just a suggestion.

Harry Styles Thinks He Smells Like Joan Didion’s House