LOS ANGELES, February 23, 2026 — Harry Styles’s latest album cover isn’t just a visual statement; it’s a walking, talking advertisement for a Los Angeles artist whose work unexpectedly found itself at the center of a pop-culture moment. The tee shirt emblazoned with the album title, Kiss All the Time. Disco., was designed by Patrick Carroll, a 36-year-old artist who discovered he’d become part of the Styles universe alongside the rest of the world.
From Artist’s Studio to Album Cover: A Viral Moment
The story began last October when Styles’s stylist, Harry Lambert, commissioned Carroll to create a series of T-shirts for an undisclosed project. Carroll, who relocated from New York to California to focus on his art, simply provided the designs. He didn’t know the full scope until Thursday, February 19, when Styles posted the album cover on Instagram. “The album cover was my first post when I opened Instagram. I literally had no actual clue,” Carroll said.
What’s the appeal of a slogan tee? A fashion designer friend once told me that a slogan T-shirt is the most accessible entry point into fashion, something Styles and Lambert seem to understand acutely. Recent examples include Jonathan Anderson’s “I Told Ya” shirt for Challengers and Conner Ives’s “Protect the Dolls” top, which quickly became a celebrity favorite.
The unexpected exposure has led to a surge in demand for Carroll’s work. He’s now balancing fulfilling orders with finishing his debut novel, a project that began during the pandemic. “I got a lot of people messaging me and I don’t have many clothes available right now, so I’m spending the morning working on my book and then in the afternoon going to the studio and making clothes to get more inventory and meet the moment!” he explained.
Balancing Art, Fashion, and a Debut Novel
Carroll’s artistic journey is multifaceted. He spent his 20s in New York before returning to his native Bay Area and eventually settling in Los Angeles. His current focus is completing his novel, which draws heavily from personal experiences. The book, which he began writing while earning his MFA in fiction at the University of California, Riverside, explores themes of family, loss, and identity.
The novel is loosely autobiographical, detailing Carroll’s experience helping his father through a neurodegenerative illness and his father’s subsequent decision to pursue physician-assisted suicide shortly before the COVID-19 shutdown. “It’s a novelization of this process,” Carroll said. “Helping a parent through illness and death, meanwhile, it has some aspects of the knitting and the art-making, and it’s very much a gay-guy-in-his-20s romp of a book too.”
