Fashion, Film, & Fantasy: The World of Shona Heath

What's Contemporary Now?

Set and Production designer Shona Heath creates enchanting, dense, and detailed worlds. Dreams within themselves, her visions have been manifested across the pages of top publications, and in collaborative partnerships with the likes of Tim Walker, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Prada, Miu Miu, and SHOWstudio. Her style seamlessly blends contemporary and vintage elements, showcasing a unique, fantastical aesthetic—brought to life through paper sculpting, painting, photography, and prop-building. Most recently, her work on Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film Poor Things won an Academy Award for Best Production Design. In an age of worldbuilding, Heath shares a journey from the countryside to imagining entire realms, underlining that creativity plays a role in designing our everyday lives.

Episode Highlights:

• Growing up in the British countryside in a modern sixties home, Heath remembers an upbringing spent outdoors, where she became intrigued with visions of scale; her mother’s crafts were also a deep influence.
• She started her career in costume design and was moved to create a set from paper for Dazed, which turned into requests for shop windows and later collaborations with Tim Walker.
• Heath’s creative process begins with words or an image, but usually, the former encourages original image-making and visualizing.
• She sees tools like AI as potentially good research tools but detrimental to her own particular craft; its use depends on the artist and their authenticity.
• She recommends working independently rather than starting as an assistant to an established artist, as then you know how to forge your own path first.
• Though she used to feel that she experienced “excessive input” when doing a project, she now feels she can better communicate her vision and appease clients and collaborators up front.
• She prefers the immediacy and direct access of working in photography to working on film sets; Heath remarks she wouldn’t be interested in doing a period piece that didn’t have an added element of creativity like Poor Things—a film she worked on with James Price, whose decades of film expertise Heath leaned on.
• Fashion’s tendency for retro revisits and zeitgeist trends plays well into her work (as opposed to interior design, which she says has more of a lag time between trends and the trend’s appearance in the culture).
• Her work on Poor Things won her an Academy Award for Best Production Design.

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