She’s the one curating some of the best style statements in B-Town, Meagan Concessio aka SpaceMuffin talks about the challenges and triumphs of styling celebrities and her journey in the industry.
Bollywood is best known for giving us plenty of trends to follow and several styles and hacks to put to use. While the B-Town celebrities are to be credited for putting their fashionable best forward, one also needs to throw a little light behind the curtains. It’s where all the magic takes place. We catch a rare glimpse of the actual masterminds behind these fabulous looks aka the stylists. Speaking of stylists, if you’ve been obsessing over the millennial divas of B-Town and their style statements of late, well then Meagan Concession is the one to be blamed for all the sass and flair being added to their wardrobes.
From Ananya Panday’s take notice looks, and Tara Sutaria’s minimal yet OTT style to Sonam Kapoor’s ultimate style diaries, Meagan Concessio is the one transforming fashion into statements even before it leaves the ramps. She has been offering her sartorial prowess to the industry for quite a long now and giving her best shot at staying a step ahead when it comes to dressing her clients. In order to catch a glimpse of celebrity styling even further, we decided to have an exclusive interview on her journey as a celebrity stylist.
In conversation with Meagan Concessio aka Spacemuffin
Given your long history of styling celebrities, can you share some styling hacks.
So I think every person should have a little styling kit at home, which should have a measuring tape, it should have a little bit of chalk, safety pins, maybe some fashion and body tape. So if you have any outfit that is loose, you can quickly add safety pin to it. If you have an outfit where you can’t wear your bra or would be visible, you can tape that area with boob tape. I think there are these lists of things that you should keep with you, and they will always keep you safe and far away from any kind of wardrobe malfunction.
If you were to style a global celebrity who would that be and why?
I think it would be Zendaya or Rihanna. Rihanna is my ultimate style icon, and then maybe my current style icon right now is Zendaya. The reason being is that they are super experimental in their style. You’d never look at either of them and expect to see them wear a certain thing because it’s always so unpredictable. And I think that is super exciting for me. So that would be my choice.
A celebrity you have the most fun styling.
I would say that the most fun I’ve had would be while I was assisting because I don’t think there’s any team in the industry that is as close as Sonam and Rhea Kapoor and the other team members who worked with me. We just have a bond that is like no other.
Your Instagram handle says ‘SpaceMuffin’, what’s the story behind it?
I think SpaceMuffin is just like a word that I came across while I was travelling and found it to be really cute. My friends always joked about how much I space out, and soon it became something that people started calling me. The name stuck, so much so, that there are people who I’ve met who have asked me to style them without knowing my real name. They’re like ‘Oh, spacemuffin’ and I’m like ‘Meagan’ and they were like we didn’t know that was your real name and I was like cool now you do.
At what point did you realise you wanted to do this as a profession?
I think it was very early on in my life, just after I completed my 12th grade, and I did a fashion design course, which I didn’t enjoy at that point in my life. I thought it wasn’t doing anything for me. Considering the type of person that I am that I need to be true and 100% interested in something in order to give it my own. So I was slacking, and at that point, I told my parents that I don’t think this course is right for me, can I just not do it and rethink what I want to do with my life, and they said okay. And luckily I’m an only child, and my parents are super, super supportive, so they let me do my own thing, which can be very scary when a 17-year-old is like, okay, listen, I want to drop out of college.
So I took up an internship with L’Officiel Magazine, and I really enjoyed just being a fashion intern there. I loved looking up new designers, looking at discussions, assisting on a shoot, bringing everything together that the shoot requires, and then eventually seeing the outcome of that. That’s when I got an interest in fashion styling, I really understood what it is that a stylist is meant to be. This was nearly editorial styling, which is one aspect of styling. And so that’s when my interest in it began to grow. And from then on, I started to make choices that eventually led me to celebrity styling.
Do you feel the Indian fashion scene gets stagnant at times? What is that one thing you’d like to change about it?
Honestly? Yes. I do feel that for designers anywhere, fashion designers need to have a very strong sense of personal, identity and aesthetics. And I think that somehow all the designers are not able to do that. You have to look at a designer and be able to tell that, oh, this is this designer. So, for example, if you see an Anamika Khanna piece you know it’s an Anamika Khanna, or a Gaurav Gupta, you know the difference. So, you need to have a very strong aesthetic as a designer. I think many designers have not been able to do that. Of course, there are many designers that are very interesting to watch, like, Kanika Goel or Dhruv Kapoor. They’re killing it. So I think that more designers need to sort of find themselves, and I think that would be great if they did because then that would eventually lead to our stylist having a lot more to play with.
What are ways you keep yourself updated with global trends?
Honestly, I love my phone, and I’m a phone addict. I’m constantly looking for inspiration, constantly looking for things outside in the world that inspire me so that can come through art, through the way people dress, through freestyle, and new collections. Just talking even online websites to see what people are wearing, what are the new clothes people are buying. And I never stop. It’s become a problem where people tell me that you’re always on my phone and you’re always looking at things. But I like to, I love taking in so much and just using it in my work. So I think I’m constantly, just looking out for new designers, new collections, cool street style. And then I’m drawing inspiration from all these things and using it in my work.
Hero Image: Courtesy Spacemuffin27/IG. Featured Image: Courtesy Meagan Concessio.
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