Harry Styles had a seemingly sweet encounter with two fans. Uh, yikes!

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Julia Parker and Katherine Christen were walking across the Williamsburg Bridge in New York the other weekend, jamming to Harry Styles’ new album, when an oncoming runner, recognizing some essential quality, gave them the heads-up: Just ahead on the bridge, walking in their direction, was none other than Harry Styles himself.

Christen immediately started filming on her phone, and thus we can see what happens next: Styles and gal-pal Zoë Kravitz approach. As they walk past, Styles smiles, then leans in for a fist bump and raises his arm for a half hug. (Off-screen, Parker was holding up her phone, showing that she was streaming his brand-new album, and pointing to her earphones, and smiling.)Then the video goes all wonky. Parker told People that Styles asked for her name and which song she was listening to (“Dance No More”), thanked her for listening, and shook their hands before he and Kravitz carried on.

As a devoted fan and scholar of fan encounters—that is, a person who loves some celebrities enough that many an algorithm has learned to serve me every scrap of content about them—I rate this one as Nearly perfect. Parker’s attempt at contact is subtle, and ignorable—Styles could have very easily smiled and kept walking. Instead, he chose to engage. There was a genuine coincidence at play here, too, one that would plausibly interest Styles himself. The result is a genuine moment of connection, thrilling for all involved.

What keeps this encounter from being perfect? Unfortunately, the video evidence is a big red FAILURE of human connection. It takes that genuine moment and sullies it for social currency. Cool: a 10-second interaction with your fav during album release week that doesn’t ask for his time and remains a nice moment between two people. Deeply uncool: secretly videoing that interaction. That video shouldn’t exist, and that it does, and that I’ve seen it, takes this interaction into the category that basically every celebrity encounter you hear about belongs in: loser territory.

The video, charming as it may be in some respects, is one of approximately 1 billion pieces of fan-generated visual evidence of Styles existing out in the world. In many of them, he’s mugging with random people on the streets. (These are all from a singular outing last week in Midtown Manhattan.) Others are candids: blurry pictures of Harry walking, cycling, riding the train, chilling on a bench, getting coffee, picking up a pizza, queueing up at a bookstore, and waiting for the new pope to be announced. Rumor has it that he commuted to SNL rehearsals last week on foot; fans certainly have had plenty of opportunities to snap photos of him recently.

Seeing those photos can be thrilling: Stars, they’re just like us. But they’re also embarrassing. I shouldn’t be seeing Styles trying to run an errand or smiling into yet another front-facing camera next to yet another person he does not know. Those photos shouldn’t exist. Can’t we just let this man live?

Many people see this fan service—selfies, shaking hands, the exchange of a few words—as part of the job of a public figure, a reasonable cost for the bounties of fame, even a service already bought and paid for with movie tickets and album copies. Some fans will say that if he’s in public, he’s there because he wants to be seen. (Look, he’s wearing new shorts from his clothing brand, this is literally a pap run!) And yes, a star like Styles knows it’s a de facto part of his job when he leaves the house to be “on” and to be gracious to fans—he can and certainly does pay someone, or many someones, to bring coffee, pizza, and news about the pope to him while he sits in his home in London, his home in Tribeca, or his home in Beverly Hills.

If you don’t feel one, tiny, polite photo is “harassment,” consider the fact that it is at least part of a harassment campaign. A famous person is bombarded with these requests constantly. Consider what happens in a short film that follows Ed Sheeran around New York: “Everywhere Sheeran goes over the 58 minutes of this film, people are whipping out their phones, gawping at him from behind their screens,” Imogen West-Knights wrote in Slate last year. “There are multiple interruptions while people ask for selfies (I use the term ‘ask’ loosely; by and large they start taking the picture before they make the request), and Sheeran submits to each one.” Terrifying!

It’s not in the interest of celebrities to complain about this kind of fan behavior—but some do it anyway. Justin Bieber opted out of fan photos 10 years ago, posting on Instagram that “it’s gotten to the point where people won’t even say hi to me or recognize me as a human, I feel like a zoo animal.” Chappell Roan has done it consistently since her breakout hit in 2024. Just months after she skyrocketed to fame, she posted a TikTok against fan bullshit. “I don’t want whatever the fuck you think you’re supposed to be entitled to when you see a celebrity,” she said. “I don’t give a fuck if you think it’s selfish of me to say no for a photo or your time or a hug. That’s not normal. That’s weird.” (It is weird!) Emily Blunt told Vanity Fair in 2018 that she had adopted Frances McDormand’s strategy with selfie requesters: “You know what? I’ve actually retired from that. But I would like to shake your hand and meet you.”

Styles, in contrast, has never been this explicit, and I don’t think ever would be, though maybe he should. The “rudest” he’s been is responding to filming or selfie-requesting fans politely, with “Can we not?” In fact, he has said that “most people you meet out are wonderful.” But I must extrapolate here and say that even if you’re approached by a few wonderful people each time you leave the house, that’s too many wonderful people. How many pictures are on how many phones of Harry smiling next to fans? Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? Reading between the lines, this is at least somewhat uncomfortable for him: He is deeply private, he says, and he loves the fans, he says, and he wants to live his life, he says.

I love celebrities. I love gossip. I love celebrity interviews and press tours and thinking about two of my favs kissing each other. I love being an adult and knowing that none of this has anything to do with the actual people in question. I love knowing I have nothing to say to these people. I love knowing they have nothing to say to me. I love keeping the fourth wall between celebrity and fan utterly and completely intact. Harry hints at his understanding of this dynamic in a line on his new album. In the track “Paint by Numbers,” he sings, “Oh, what a gift it is to be noticed / But it’s nothin’ to do with me.” (Sing it, sister!)

My husband Matt and I had been friends for a long time by the time we finally got together. Once we did, I became obsessed with him, rereading all of our old emails, scrolling to the beginning of his Instagram feed. And that’s how I saw the picture of him and the actor Gael García Bernal posing together on a London street three years earlier. My stomach dropped. The love of my life was a person who had asked a celebrity for a selfie. I was so disappointed.

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I forgave him for the García Bernal picture. He saw an actor he liked, and did what he knew to be the thing one does in such a situation: He said hello and asked for a photo. He had not thought about the interaction beyond that. But I had. I had a lot. And harassing celebrities just wasn’t compatible with the kind of life that I wanted to live, i.e., a life of respecting people and the rock-solid fourth wall between celebrity and fan.

I told him that it was important to me that he never approach a celebrity in my presence. He laughed, thinking I was joking, a bit of banter. His confusion was perhaps warranted. He knew I spent many hours a day consuming content about various former members of One Direction. Was I really telling him that I wouldn’t ask Harry Styles for a selfie if I saw him on the street? I told him that I was. I haven’t gotten to test that theory with Styles, but we lived in the West Village for many years and encountered many famous people in the neighborhood—and we both managed to play it cool.

But here’s what would happen if Styles did pass us as we walked down the street:  I’d smile at him, and then I’d grab Matt’s arm hard enough to leave a mark. Yes, I would be beside myself! And then I would take a breath and have the same revelation I’ve had every time I’ve seen a famous person in the flesh: Wow, just a person, after all.

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