Harry Styles Aperture Music Video: What's Actually Going On

The whole thing takes place inside the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles — specifically the Bonavista Lounge and the hotel's interior spaces. That building is famous in LA. Circular atrium, glass elevators, a kind of brutalist-glam aesthetic that doesn't exist anywhere else. It's been used in films since the 80s and it shows.

The choice isn't accidental. The Bonaventure has this sealed-off, slightly surreal quality — you walk in and the outside world disappears. That feeling maps directly onto what "Aperture" is doing sonically: contained, focused, a little claustrophobic in the best way.

The LA City Hall reference in the cards suggests they shot around the civic center area too, which tracks with some of the exterior-adjacent framing visible in stills from the production.

Kid Harpless directed this. That's the same director Styles has worked with before, and the visual consistency shows. There's a specific grammar here — soft grain, warm color temperature, lenses that breathe slightly. It reads analog even if it isn't entirely.

The cards point to Kodak motion picture film as a reference point, and the look is consistent with shooting on film stock rather than pushing a digital grade to mimic it. The difference matters. Film has a particular way of handling highlights — they don't clip the same way. Skin tones sit differently. You can't fully fake it in DaVinci Resolve or Magic Bullet, though both are clearly part of the finishing pipeline.

ARRI lighting gets flagged in the cards too, which tells you the DP wasn't cutting corners. That's a real budget going into practical light setups, not just available light dressed up in post.

Styles has been building a visual identity for years — the 2020 Vogue cover, the Ha Ha Ha Gucci collaboration, the consistent lean into genderless dressing. "Aperture" continues that.

The cards reference JW Anderson, Palomo Spain, Harris Reed, and Prada shoes. That's not a stylist pulling random pieces. That's a coherent point of view — British, slightly camp, rooted in menswear traditions but not constrained by them.

The Camp aesthetic reference is explicit in the card deck, which is useful context. Camp isn't irony for its own sake. It's sincerity pushed so far it becomes theatrical. That's exactly the register this video operates in.

The styling credit goes to this specific Instagram post — worth checking if you want to track down individual pieces.

The choreographer is Ryan Heffington. That name matters. Heffington did the choreography for Sia's "Chandelier" video — the one with Maddie Ziegler. His movement language is specific: physically committed, slightly raw, not the clean synchronised lines of a pop choreo package.

The cards drop a direct Dirty Dancing reference at the 201-second mark. That's not a coincidence — Heffington and the director are consciously pulling from that tradition. Physical storytelling, close contact, the body as the primary instrument.

The actor who appears alongside Styles is Danny Dolan. The interaction between them carries most of the video's emotional weight. It's not a performance staged at the camera. It's two people in a room.

Harry's House came out in 2022 and won the Grammy for Album of the Year. "Aperture" sits within that project — sonically it belongs to the same space: intimate, slightly melancholic, built around presence rather than scale.

The production credits point to Kid Harpoon Studios, which is where most of the album was built. Kid Harpoon — real name Thomas Hull — has co-written and produced with Styles since Fine Line. The sound is recognizable. Piano-forward, space used deliberately, vocals close in the mix.

Columbia Records is the label. The Spotify release and Apple Music pages are both live. If you want the physical version, the official store has vinyl.

Pleasing — Styles's beauty and lifestyle brand — also gets a card in the video, consistent with how that brand has been woven into his creative output rather than treated as a separate commercial thing.

The production company behind this is Partizan — one of the serious ones. They've produced videos for Daft Punk, Michel Gondry worked under their banner early on. When Partizan is attached you're not getting a budget music video. You're getting a film production that happens to be three and a half minutes long.

The visual references in the card deck are worth reading as a mood board: Nowness for the general aesthetic register, MUBI for the experimental cinema touchstones, and The Dandy Warhols flagged under art direction — which tells you something about the kind of rock-and-roll looseness they wanted to keep even inside a polished production.

The Tim Walker fashion photography reference also appears — Walker is the British photographer known for elaborate, dreamlike tableaux. His influence on the visual language here is visible in the set design and the way space is treated as a constructed thing, not just a backdrop.

Taken together, this isn't a video made to service a single. It's a short film with a budget and a point of view.