Meg Mills says it best as we walk down Saint Mark’s Place in New York City and attempt to enter the last true punk vestige of the street, legendary shop Search and Destroy, only to realize that it is locked and closed. “There’s something symbolic about the punk store being closed and having to go to the bubble tea next door,” says Mills.
At 28-years old, she is the darling, newly added guitarist of the hardcore band Turnstile. The band, comprised of singer Brendan Yates, drummer Daniel Fang, guitarist Pat McCrory, bassist Franz Lyons, and now Mills on guitar, has transitioned from playing local basement shows in Baltimore to nabbing a spot at Coachella (and a mention from Charli XCX). There’s a heart-panging nostalgia with the Turnstile sound, the sort of melancholy ache that comes with driving around a small town as a teenager; a simmering, bottled-up longing that dreamily explodes.
Now, the whole world is getting a taste of Turnstile. The day before we meet on Saint Mark’s, Mills played guitar on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, thrashing around on a retro set reminiscent of the band’s Father Yod-inflected music videos. She wore an Alexander McQueen look: wickedly pointy knee-skimming black leather boots with a slight heel, a kicky leather skirt, and a sheer top. The outfit came together with the help of journalist Jodie Hill.
Given Mills’s past, her biting, sassy style makes sense. Growing up in East London, she always had an alternative streak, which, as a teenager, often rears its head through music. She learned to play the guitar around age 11 on a nylon-string guitar that her grandfather gave her as a gift. Later, she transitioned to an electric guitar, which she would eventually use in all of her bands. (She credits her uncle for teaching her how to play her first life-changing song, Rage Against the Machine’s “Bombtrack” on bass.) Back then, her playlist was mostly My Chemical Romance and Paramore. “I would say early on, I definitely listened to those bands. Anything that would set you apart from the other kids in school,” she says. “At the time, it was an immediate way to be like, ‘I’m not listening to Justin Bieber. I’m listening to My Chemical Romance,’ which I think was a very early foray into an alternative culture.” In a full circle moment, Paramore’s lead singer Hayley Williams joined the band onstage at their concert at Brooklyn’s Under the K Bridge Park and will also appear on the upcoming album. (Mills posed with Williams on her Instagram: both wore camouflage print cargos.) Later, Mills went to study costume design at university before finally moving to Leeds—a more affordable hub for the hardcore scene that allowed her to play music without the financial crunch of the big city.
Today, Mills’ look is a delightful, thoughtful, and saucy amalgamation of her youth. She wears the epic Vivienne Westwood pirate boots. Her miniskirt is from a London-based brand called Jaded, and on her neck are a zillion necklaces and charms from Gemini Jewels. Other jewelry includes a beaded charm bracelet with “Meg” spelled out (a gift from a fan in South America), a Vivienne Westwood ring (a London must), a ring from Carpet Company in Baltimore (the band’s hometown), and another from her grandfather. The hero piece of her outfit is an old Agnostic Front band t-shirt that she scooped from an old boyfriend. “I’ve brought it on every single tour with me since I was about 19. It was a size extra-large and I sewed it into a little vest,” she says, pointing to the T-shirt collar. “It’s definitely a bit yellow around the neck.” (I tell her that there are collectors out there who’d be willing to shell out for the perfectly tattered and yellowed piece.)
Mills’ designer list, which she keeps in her iPhone notes, boasts the sort of buzzy names that all young fashion lovers live and die for. There are the New York-born misfits, such as Collina Strada, Vaquera, and Sandy Liang, alongside the Londoners like Chopova Lowena and Ashley Williams, as well as the classics like Vivienne Westwood. She cites some of her teenage influences, which included Blondie (“she could wear a, like, a bin bag and be cool”) and Kim Deal of The Breeders (“she would wear workwear [to perform]”), as perennial references Like many of us, she searches through Vestiaire and Depop, the latter, where she scored her Heaven by Marc Jacobs nylon bag and those incredible Westwood boots. (Mills says she nabbed them for £150.) “I love John Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, and these designers that had more of a foot in the costume world,” says Mills, citing her costume studies background. “I don’t really trawl SSENSE and things like that for new pieces. I’m more like, ‘Oh, what’s a sick vintage piece that I can find on Vestiaire or Depop?’”
The rest of the band also has their foot in the fashion universe. In 2024, Turnstile collaborated with Converse on a sneaker, and the year before, they were profiled by GQ for their Grammy looks. Is the foray into fashion a no-no in the world of hardcore? After all, there have been some comments cropping up on Reddit about the change of sound and missing the old Turnstile. “People are purists, but the thing is … I would say I’m also somewhat of a purist, but I also completely support bands who are truly, genuinely authentic in themselves, and that’s just the way they progress,” Mills says “I think you can tell the difference between something that’s authentic and something that isn’t.” As for Mills and her roughed-up Vivienne Westwood boots, she’s certainly the real deal.
