The story Harry Styles tells about Alessandro Michele is not the story most musicians tell about a designer. It begins in 2018, backstage at a Gucci runway show in Milan, where Styles, then twenty-four and on the second album of his solo career, ended up sitting next to the man who had spent the previous three years rebuilding Gucci into the most-talked-about house in luxury. They liked each other. They stayed in touch. Over the next four years, Michele dressed Styles for everything that mattered: the cover of Vogue (the first solo male cover in the magazine's history), the Met Gala, two album campaigns, the entire Love On Tour run. The relationship was visible, sustained, and obviously creative on both sides.
Then, in October 2022, they released a collection together. Not a capsule. Not a co-sign. Twenty-five looks. Co-designed. Called HA HA HA, after the way Styles signs off his text messages.
Most musician-designer collaborations are commercial structures dressed up as creative ones. A label decides a celebrity would be useful for a campaign. A merchandising team builds the line, the celebrity approves it, the deal pays them in the high six figures, and the resulting product carries the celebrity's name without bearing much of their hand. HA HA HA is one of the rare exceptions, and the resale market has started to figure that out.
The collection draws openly from the Italian tailoring tradition Michele had been excavating at Gucci since 2015. Burgundy wool blazers with peak lapels and a softly boxy '70s cut. Camp-collar silk shirts with busy prints in jewel tones. High-waisted, slightly cropped charcoal wool trousers. A wool varsity jacket with HA HA HA embroidered across the back. A velvet blazer in midnight blue that looks like something a Bowie sideman would have worn in 1973. Every piece is gender-fluid by construction, not by marketing copy: the cuts genuinely work across bodies, and the press images show this deliberately.
What separates HA HA HA from a vanity-credit collection is the specificity of the references. Michele has spoken in interviews about the collection emerging from conversations he had with Styles about "things we both love," which sounds like a corporate non-answer until you look at the pieces. The sweater knits reference '70s campaign clothing for British political parties. The signet rings echo the ones Styles wears in real life. A specific shade of pale pink appears in two outerwear pieces that match the pink suit Styles wore at the 2022 Brit Awards. None of these references would survive a normal merchandising process. They survived because two people were in the room together making decisions, which is not how most of these deals work.
The ones that matter are not the ones where a label decides a celebrity would be useful for a campaign. They are the ones where a creative relationship already exists and a commercial structure is being built around it.
The release was small by Gucci standards. Italian production, limited distribution, no aggressive markdown cycle. That scarcity is what makes the resale market interesting now. Three years on, the collection's pricing tells a story about how the market values authentic creative collaboration: the burgundy blazer, originally $4,200 retail, sits at $470 on The RealReal in good condition with tags, while Gucci's standard runway tailoring from the same season trades 30 to 40 percent lower. The HA HA HA branding, which retailers worried might depress resale value at launch, has done the opposite. It marks the piece as a co-design.
The pieces to watch are the silk shirts and the velvet blazers. The shirts because they are the easiest entry into the collection at sub-$400 prices, and because the prints are already showing up in editorial styling for current-season looks. The velvet blazers because they were produced in much smaller quantities than the wool, and the midnight blue colourway is now nearly impossible to find in larger sizes. A piece that retailed at $5,800 sat on Grailed at $1,117 in early 2026. That is not a price floor; it is a buy signal.
The pieces to skip, if you are buying for resale rather than for wear, are the more obviously trend-driven items: the chunky platform loafers, the fanny packs, the more graphic knitwear. These are doing what trend-driven Gucci has always done, which is to lose 50 percent of their value in two years and another 25 percent in the third. Buy them because you love them, not because you expect to flip them.
A note on Michele. In late 2022, he left Gucci. Sabato De Sarno took over as creative director and pulled the house in a different direction: minimalist, restrained, distinctly post-Michele. Within fashion, this is sometimes treated as the definitive end of an era. Within the resale market, it is the opposite. Michele's Gucci is now a finite design language. No more pieces in this idiom will ever be produced under the Gucci label. That is the condition under which collector value tends to settle in. HA HA HA is the most personal statement of that idiom we are likely to get, which is the reason a burgundy wool blazer with HA HA HA stitched on the inside lining is worth paying attention to in a way that almost no other 2022 Gucci piece is.
Buy what you can wear. Skip what you cannot. Watch the velvet.