‘I’m an everythingist’: How Es Devlin became the go-to for Beyoncé gigs, fashion runways and the Olympics

The Londoner is the set designer big names turn to for eye-popping spectacle. As a new retrospective opens, she gives the Guardian a glimpse at her studio

Four years ago, the V&A East Storehouse in east London got in touch with Es Devlin. The museum’s curators wanted to invite the British artist and designer to respond to a 100-year-old theatrical backdrop by the Russian artist and designer Natalia Goncharova. For a 1926 London production of The Firebird by the Ballets Russes, Goncharova had painted a fortified Muscovite cityscape festooned with onion domes and spires, rust-red and golden against a deep-blue sky. Devlin didn’t know much about Goncharova. But alighting on the term she had favoured for describing her kaleidoscopic approach to art-making, Devlin realised she’d found a kindred spirit. “She called herself an ‘everythingist’,” Devlin says, a smile in her eyes.

Works in progress in Devlin’s studio

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