Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video? Maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for how long.

Kaitlyn: First of all, we need to explain why there are three names at the top of this post instead of the usual two. Here’s the explanation: One Video with Kaitlyn and Lizzie is, for one special week, One Video with Kaitlyn and Lizzie and Rebecca Jennings from Racked. Rebecca knows more about Harry Styles than most living people, she also knows a lot about fashion, and today we’re here to discuss both. Plus we like her, she’s very nice to be around.

Rebecca: That was a wonderful introduction! I’m also currently wearing a T-shirt with an illustration of Harry’s face on it, which I feel like I needed to mention.

Lizzie: I would definitely be in the bottom ranking of this Harry Styles trivia team, but I’m just happy to be here.

This week’s video: “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles

Kaitlyn: Harry Styles’ debut solo album Harry Styles came out today, and the music video for its lead single “Sign of the Times” came out on Monday. The week was all about Harry Styles, from the memes to the fan art to the Snapchat filters to the morning shows to the soft pink bubble hovering around my body and protecting it at all times.

Rebecca: If I were at all interested in higher learning I would probably write a master’s thesis about that soft pink bubble world. I would call it Sign of the Times: On Subverting Masculinity, Millennial Pink, and Childbirth Iconography in Harry Styles’s Album Art.

Lizzie: “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles was directed by Woodkid, a Scottish musician who makes this kind of flush, ambient music that might soundtrack a heartbreaking indie drama. (Incidentally, he did soundtrack this 2015 movie starring Gael García Bernal and Jeffrey Dean Morgan.) He hasn’t released a solo album since 2013, but the “Sign of the Times” video looks enough like his music sounds that it doesn’t really matter. What I’m saying is: his music sounds like a countryside at dusk and a boy with windswept hair soaring through the sky.

Who is Harry Styles?

Kaitlyn: Harry Styles is, depending on who you ask, “a true rock & roll prince,” “the next Frank Sinatra,” “the latest art-throb at bat,” “a floppy-haired 23-year-old,” “the former de facto frontman of the UK boy-band sensation One Direction,” or “the Chelsea Hotel.” If you ask me, all of these things are true, except the last two — one of which is not especially fair to four other very famous people, and the other of which is a metaphor likening Harry to a large, haunted building. I don’t know how I would describe him, maybe Rebecca can try.

Rebecca: Despite the fact that he’s been extremely famous since he was 16, Harry has managed to have had exactly zero scandals. He’s the kind of person for whom other extremely famous people go out of their way to express how nice he is. He doesn’t act like other pop stars, he doesn’t sound like other pop stars, and he definitely doesn’t dress like other pop stars (a topic I have written about at length).

He is a perfect, beautiful, androgynous sofa-print-suit–wearing baby sparrow. There, I think I got it.  

What’s special about “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles:

Lizzie: Aesthetically, it’s got all the classic stuff down. Nice landscape, nice haircut, impossible feat of human accomplishment. But also, this video gifted us with more memes than most music videos usually do, in just one week.

The memes work because a) this is a very popular video that most people will immediately recognize, and b) it’s still pretty weird. Like Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video, “Sign of the Times” is pretty obviously asking its millions of viewers to make a GIF now and think of a joke later.

Rebecca: One of my favorite memes from the video is the juxtaposition of Harry flying and the One Direction song “If I Could Fly,” and those are sometimes placed next to a photo of some woman weeping proudly.

Kaitlyn: This whole conversation is reminding me just how much I too love weeping, especially out of pride. Lizzie is right though — I made several GIFs the first time I watched this video, mulled the GIFs over for many hours, and then came up with a couple of jokes. They were okay.

It’s also nice, sometimes, to read the comments on music videos. In the comments for this one, somebody wrote “HARRY’S THE FIRST HUMAN TO FLY.” This is a meme backed by pure joy and slack-jawed wonder. Harry. Can. Fly.

Rebecca: Yes, I especially enjoy the comments that said, “PROOF THAT HARRY IS JESUS,” because there’s one extremely GIF-able moment where he walks on water.

Also special: Harry’s outfit. The coat, which has tigers on the sleeves, is Gucci and costs $3,200. The sweater is Burberry and costs $895, and the boots, which are maybe the best part about this video even though he rarely uses them to walk on solid ground, are also Gucci and cost $1,200.

How long everyone should watch “Sign of the Times” by Harry Styles:

Kaitlyn: At least to the point (0:38) where Harry lifts off of the ground and starts flying, which will put you in the perfect frame of mind to go listen to the rest of his beautiful album.

Lizzie: Yeah, I would say you could get away with watching around a minute of this, then you can just kind of scroll back and forth through the rest of it. It is, perhaps, a sign of the times that I find it difficult to watch a five-minute video that only offers some visual pleasantries without any comedy or famous guest stars.

Rebecca: I’m going to go ahead with the assumption that you have definitely already watched this video, but a fun reason to watch it again is to see if you can spot a frame where you can see Harry’s horrifying stunt double. I’m pretty sure he’s not even in it at all, but maybe he is! You never know!

Apple released its courageous new wireless AirPods in December, and in that time, we’ve spotted lots of people wearing the earbuds on the streets and subways of NYC. Verge reporter Sean O’Kane reviewed them here. But in that review, Sean didn’t talk much about the aesthetic of the AirPods. Do they look good? How do they make us feel? Can they work with our commuter lifestyle and style? We recruited two certifiably fashionable people from our sister publication Racked — Rebecca Jennings, associate producer, and Cameron Wolf, menswear editor — to talk through the fashion of AirPods.

Ashley: Hello everyone! Thanks for helping us with the important task of figuring out whether the AirPods are a net gain or net loss for fashion. Before launching into that weighty discussion, how did your experience go with them more generally? Did you like them?

Rebecca: Hello! I should start by saying that I had to Google “how to turn on AirPods” before actually using them, and then after that, I spent about five minutes playing with the magnet lid thing. It’s extremely satisfying. Anyway, I highly enjoyed my time with the AirPods, and was genuinely sad about having to give them to Cam.

Cam: Rebecca passed her Googled knowledge onto me, but I really could not be saved. I had a lot of trouble trying to connect these to my computer, which seems like a reasonable thing to do if I’m at the office even if Rebecca thought it was dumb. I had better success with my phone, and pausing music by taking out an earpiece is objectively cool, but the experience wasn’t super fluid. One or both headphones would unexpectedly disconnect often enough. To reconnect I had to find the headphone holder in my bag, carefully place two pen-cap sized objects in their specific holes, and then reconnect. Not fun on a crowded New York subway.

Also, one of my favorite things about corded headphones is that I can easily adjust the volume without pulling my phone out. No such luck with the AirPods. I gladly passed them back to Rebecca.

Sean: I definitely didn’t have those troubles when I reviewed AirPods. In fact, I enjoyed the experience so much — when they weren’t falling out of my ears — that I didn’t care much about how they looked. I hated the look of them when Apple announced them last September, and I still kind of do now, but I was able to forget that hate while I used them. That’s something.

Ashley: I tried them for the first time this week and had issues with them dropping their connection in the middle of calls. That wasn’t great. I also just can’t get over the idea of having to charge another device. Who has time for all this charging? Plus, I constantly worried I’d lose them because they’re tiny. My long nails were problematic when trying to drop the little guys into their charging hole.

So all of that was bad, but ultimately, I found AirPods super convenient. I loved that I could take them out of their container and pop them in my ears to listen to music or make a phone call immediately.

We all seemingly had different experiences with their actual functionality, but here’s the real question: how did you feel you looked in them? Were you proud to wear them, or did you feel silly? How did people react to you? Rebecca and Cam, do you have official fashion takes?

Rebecca: I’m pretty sure I didn’t stop blushing for the first hour that I wore them — and this was in an office where people are always doing weird things like wearing overalls and attempting to hoverboard. But there was nothing more enjoyable to me than seeing the looks on my co-workers’ faces, followed by me removing one AirPod and being like, “What? Oh, these old things?”

Anyway, the experience was markedly less enjoyable on the subway, where I didn’t understand why people kept staring at me until I remembered I had white plastic sticks bursting out of my ears like some sort of disease. Also, the feeling that at any point a crazy person could simply pluck them off your face was a little disconcerting.

Cam: I feel like Rebecca and I are on exact opposite ends of this. I didn’t mind the look of them at all and didn’t feel the intense glare of my fellow commuters. But I feel like even if I had, I’d have chalked it up to envy and not to being judged as some Bluetooth-wearing Wall Streeter. If anything, AirPods felt like a huge flex in the the same way an Apple Watch does. Hyped-up new products get released and they’re so instantly recognizable; it’s not so different from what happens in the fashion industry. It felt a little like, yes, I have the new shit.

Sean: What’s funny to me is that, if you pull way back, isn’t it also kind of weird to have cords coming from your ears? After I used AirPods, I kept looking at other people using regular corded earbuds and thinking that was starting to look a little strange. Maybe AirPods won’t feel so foreign someday soon. Of course, the corded earbuds are a great way of signifying “don’t talk to me,” and we’d lose that.

Ashley: I didn’t think about that, but it’s true. I’m sure eventually we’ll find wired earbuds weird, but for now, the AirPods definitely stand out. I didn’t mind the extra attention I got on the subway. I figured people would judge me, but I think that’s kind of the point of fashion, like Cam said. They’re challenging to wear, made me look kind of silly, but also made me feel cool and on top of the trends. I’m a believer in the idea that anyone can wear anything they want so long as they own it. You have to fully own the AirPods.

By the way, they look great when you take a selfie with the puppy dog filter on Snapchat.

So Rebecca and Cam, I’m wondering, do you think it even matters if the AirPods are fashionable? Is Apple such a luxurious and reputable brand that people will buy and sport AirPods regardless of how they look? Does Apple putting its name on a product make it inherently chic?

Cam: No. And I think the Apple Watch is absolute proof of that. I don’t think the watch has done particularly well against strong competition in the wearables space and strictly from a fashion perspective it was panned when it first came out. And this was after a ton of advertising, poaching higher-ups from Saint Laurent, Burberry, Nike, and Tag Heuer to work on the dang thing, and a Vogue China cover. I’m probably forgetting some points there, too. But point is: Apple tried really hard to make this a Fashion Thing and it didn’t work. Don’t think the Apple magic is going to make a return just for the AirPods.

Rebecca: Completely agree with Cam here. Just because a huge brand like Apple is pushing disembodied headphone sticks doesn’t mean that the capital-F fashion industry is obligated to embrace them. That’s not to say they’ll never become cool organically — as in, on street style or social media — but if the fashion establishment start pushing AirPods like they did the Apple Watch, all they’d be doing is ensuring AirPods get an even more eye-rolly reaction than they already do.

Ashley: Cool, so now I have a final question: would you spend $160 on these?

Sean: Having covered wireless earbuds on The Verge for a while now, that price tag is actually pretty competitive and almost makes me want to buy them. But like I said in my review, these suckers don’t stay in my ears as well as they should, so I’m stuck waiting for AirPods 2.0. Apple’s industrial designers basically made the choice for me.

Cam: I definitely would not spend $160 on these. I had problems using them and avoiding the occasional snag of the headphone cord doesn’t seem worth it at all. Especially when you can bet these will start to get included for free in future releases of the iPhone much like the corded headphones are now.

Rebecca: THESE ARE $160?! That is insane, and now I am back to being mad at Apple, which is my usual state of being. I would definitely not spend $160 on these, especially when there’s roughly a 90 percent chance you will lose one of them, or when, as I mentioned before, a crazy person plucks them from your head.

Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales.

Apple AirPods review