Kacey Musgraves made this past decade a time of transformation: She released her first album, Same Trailer Different Park, in 2013, and her latest album, Golden Hour, in 2018, bookending the decade, and tying the albums together with lyrics about LGBTQ+ acceptance, recreational drug use, and casual sex. Though Musgraves has always been a progressive country star, the 2010s showed the Grammy Award-winning singer truly coming into her own with a new sound and style.

When you listen to Golden Hour — a dreamy concoction of country, pop, folk, and disco elements — and then look at Kacey Musgraves, it clicks. This is thanks to her “glam fam,” which consists of stylist Erica Cloud, hairstylist Giovanni Delgado, and makeup artist Moani Lee. Cloud — who also styles Awkwafina, D'arcy Carden, and Zooey Deschanel — was specifically brought on by Musgraves’s manager, Jason Owen, to help the “High Horse” crooner enter the next phase of her career. “[I started styling Kacey] about two years ago,” Cloud tells Teen Vogue. “Jason thought that [Kacey and I] would be a good match because she was changing directions.”

Before becoming the curator of Musgraves’s wardrobe, Cloud worked in retail, event planning, and production, which is where she met stylist Karla Welch. Cloud then worked for Welch, until three years ago, when she decided to branch off on her own. “I didn’t know so many things existed in this field when I was younger, so I learned to work hard,” Cloud explains. That hard work led her to Musgraves, whose iconography features sparkle, modern silhouettes, and vintage pieces, but does not come off as costume-y or stereotypical. It sends the message that she is a modern country star in her own right. This evolution has even garnered itself a “Kacey Musgraves: All of the Colors” exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, on display until June.

To explore what goes into crafting Kacey Musgraves’s image as a new kind of country star, we spoke with Cloud about the songwriter’s most iconic looks and the stories behind them.

Teen Vogue: When it came to Kacey changing directions, how did you translate that into her wardrobe?

Erica Cloud: She and I had a long conversation about aesthetic. We both love a lot of '60s and '70s inspiration, because it runs that fine line of seeming modern but also is very much a specific decade or two. A lot of things are rooted in the past, and the great part about Kacey is that she too is both of those things: She’s modern and progressive, but there are hints of nostalgia and that seem familiar about her.