This Soft Bear Enjoying An Ice Cake with Frozen Fruit Reminds Me of Harry Styles

Welcome to This ___ Reminds Me of Harry Styles, a blog where I discuss stuff that is Harry-adjacent. Lots of things remind me of Harry Styles, and this is one of them.

When Harry Styles left One Direction, he went full Stevie Nicks. Realizing he never could embody her, or Bowie, or any vintage mystique reserved for the rock and roll greats of pre-Internet yesteryear as the most public facing figure in one of the biggest boy bands of all time, he… still went Bowie, in Mick Jagger’s suits. As far as I can tell, when he’s not wearing floral, fitted menswear, he’s shirtless, shoulder deep in a millennial pink pool like in the artwork for his debut solo album—relaxing in a bath of wastewater, soaking near beautiful garbage. Most of those words also encapsulate how I would describe Milana, a polar bear who lives in Hanover, Germany and enjoys an ice cake full of frozen fruit, as pictured above. She’s very cute, just like my boyfriend Harold on the back cover of his eponymous record:

Now look at them side by side and try to convince me they are not twins:

It’s uncanny, really.

When Harry sang, “Just stop your crying / Have the time of your life / Breaking through the atmosphere / And things are pretty good from here / Remember everything…” in his first solo single, “Sign of the Times,” he was likely referring to the sweet release of death post-climate change devastation, and no one knows that better than a polar bear. Could you imagine your kind going extinct? And still finding ice cakes to smile about? It’s gut-wrenching, but also kind of beautiful, much like the 2017 World War II drama Dunkirk, filmed in such a way as to elongate the lingering disquietude of battle, the very flick Styles starred in.

There are a million more connections to be made—Milana and Harry are both soft, both pleasant to look at, good floaters, wet—but I’ll leave it at that, so you may continue to gaze upon both images.