Harry Styles is back in the country and kicked off his national tour by downing a shoey in Perth on Monday night and, according to pictures doing the rounds of Melbourne Whatsapp groups, playing a round of golf at Royal Melbourne.

But this is a vastly different Styles to the one we saw five years ago. He’s bigger than ever before – a solo artist, pop phenomenon and style icon, not just the One Direction member with a side project. The proof is at Melbourne’s craft and party supply stores, which are running low on feather boas ahead of Styles’s concerts at Marvel Stadium tonight and tomorrow.

Numerous actors and musicians have made the feather boa their own over the years, but in 2023 it belongs firmly to Styles, who wears his in homage to ’70s glam rocker Marc Bolan. And fans love to emulate his look. The most fervent among them began queuing at Marvel from 4am this morning to snap up merchandise.

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“Early this morning I had a lot of people come in and ask me for feather boas,” says Anna Nguyen, who works in the party department at Big W’s QV store. “A lot of teenage girls, young women. I was like, ‘What’s going on?’. After maybe the third customer they said, ‘Yeah, Harry Styles.’ We had a few more delivered today, and they sold out within an hour.”

Big W’s head office confirmed to Broadsheet that interest has surged: “With the arrival of Harry Styles in Australia on his concert tour and World Pride celebrations in swing, searches for feather boas on Big W's website increased by 394 per cent and sales increased by 114 per cent in the past two weeks, with pink proving to be everyone’s top pick,” a spokesperson said.

At Spotlight’s store in South Melbourne, a single lowly black feather boa was left on the rack among sequinned bowties and metallic tiaras. When a Broadsheet editor asked if there were any other boas around, a sales assistant said they’d completely sold out, and that it was a similar situation at stores across Melbourne and in Geelong. (The crestfallen Broadsheet editor went with a hot pink tiara instead.)

“Since Saturday 18 February, Spotlight has seen a record uplift in the sale of DIY costume
items around Australia,” says Heather Jovanovic, the chain’s buyer for costumes. “Stores in Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania have completely sold out of feather boas. We’ve also seen a sales increase of 131 per cent for cowboy hats and a 165 per cent increase for face glitter.

“Every year we see increased demand for these products around events like Mardi Gras but
record demand for these items can arguably be attributed to the Harry Styles concerts and
his distinctively bold style. It’s fantastic to see more Australians embracing the DIY movement and choosing to create their own costumes or accessories as a form of fun and self-expression.”

Live Nation, the promoter running the tour, declined to share how many tickets it’s sold for the two concerts, but given that Marvel can hold 50,000 people for the footy, we’re guessing up to 30,000 seats per performance. That’s a lot of feather boas.