What initially brought you into costume design?

I turned up in Cambridge, went to the Freshers’ Fair, went for a look around and thought I’d put my name down for fresher plays. I did a fresher play, and from there came a snowball effect of everyone asking me to do more things.

How do you think the set interacts with costume?

With period pieces it is so important to get it right, with meticulous attention to detail. So, for example, for Grief, I went to Ebay and made sure I bought a women’s weekly magazine from 1958, so it could be used as a prop along with an authentic 1940s sofa set to collect the threads of all these individual visual narratives across the scenes. What made the whole piece truly beautiful was working closely with the lighting designer to see how it would look for the performance. Another thing we did with Grief was to fit the colour and mood of the main character within the context of the set. Although the set did not change, she had many different scenes in different clothes. We wanted some of that drab life to be reflected in the colour and shape of the clothes. The detail with which her character was expressed through her costume made this the most intensive and complete understanding I have ever had for a particular character.

What is the significance of using costumes and sets that are from a completely different era to the original setting of the work?

The National Theatre is putting on a production of Amadeus at the moment, where the actors are clothed in regency dress but with a post-punk aftertaste – and I like that. I love seeing men in velvet breeches and Dr Martens. But I do think that it is very much the director’s decision and I would not become involved in a play if I disagreed creatively with the director’s vision.

I really love the opportunity to play with the abstraction of eras and concepts. When we did Eugene Onegin with Agnes Cameron, we dressed the chorus in a rendition of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. The group of peasants who were in some of the scenes were dressed is mustards and reds as an abstraction of what we assume peasants would wear. I think with opera, especially the use of incongruous design is especially powerful. The singers can sing the same music, in the same way and with the same gestures, but if they are dressed in a costume that is entirely unexpected it makes you question the designer’s motivations for this departure from tradition.

Where do you look for inspiration?

Anywhere from drag queens, club kids, Leigh Bowery to watching blockbuster films and seeing how a huge production design comes together to create a particular mood.

The last one that I was so impressed by was Mad Max, which I know did not receive much critical acclaim. But the costume designer, Jenny Beavan, won an Oscar for her work. Despite the complexities of designing for such a huge project, she made a cohesive aesthetic where every character was both terrifying and exquisite.

Social media has also made it so easy for us to connect creatively. Even looking at Instagram is so useful, because you can come across a stimulus and be able to credit its author. I mean, there is a designer I follow called Domonique Echeverria, who designs a lot of drag queen clothes, but obviously she is a club kid herself. She goes out in full shamanistic, earth mother ensembles using nudity and fabric in a really thought-provoking way with a host of different natural textures. So I am able to get a lot of inspiration from simply discovering new people online