The Set Designer Setting the Stage of All Your Favorites

As every brand scrambles for metaverse moments, Devlin is quietly re-architecting the real world. In a time when most culture lives behind glass, through screens, streams, and scrolls, she reminds us that the future might still belong to people, not pixels. Her work exists outside the algorithm. It’s monumental but human, theatrical but intimate. You don’t watch her work. You enter it. The audience is always the protagonist. That’s her quiet revolution.

She’s the architect behind some of the most defining stages in modern culture: Kanye West’s Watch the Throne tour, Beyoncé’s Formation, The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn, Adele’s 25 world tour, U2’s mirrored worlds, Saint Laurent’s runway in Morocco’s Agafay Desert, and Louis Vuitton’s Louvre show, where 200 live performers turned fashion into a living monument. Each one feels like a cathedral of light and emotion, but what makes them powerful is how close they feel. Even when she builds for 60,000 people, it feels like she’s designing for one.

She started in theatre, designing sets for Hamlet and Macbeth, which is maybe why her pop spectacles still feel like character studies. Light became her handwriting. Every beam, a sentence. A single one can redraw a boundary. A blackout can feel like a heartbeat. She calls her work “films you can walk through,” because, as she puts it, “you can’t walk through a movie.” That’s her whole philosophy: to design empathy at scale.

Kanye’s floating cubes mirrored an era’s ego while reflecting the crowd back at itself. Beyoncé’s Formation stage revolved between dominance and vulnerability. The Weeknd’s burning skyline turned fame into apocalypse. Her work doesn’t just stage performance. It stages perception, making people feel before they understand why.

When the subject isn’t a superstar, it’s us. Her installation Congregation turned fifty portraits of displaced people into light-filled symbols of what they bring to the world, not what they’ve lost. In ROOM 2022, she transformed a hotel into a metaphor for the human brain, all mazes, mirrors, and memory. She even collaborated with Bvlgari on a glowing labyrinth that reimagined luxury as something fleeting and alive.

Her medium isn’t just light. It’s people. Every project begins with collaboration, with choirs, engineers, poets, and strangers drawn into her orbit, and ends with connection. She can make a stadium feel like a whisper. Her rooms, mazes, and stages remind us that even in an age of spectacle, the most powerful thing an artist can do is make us present.

Maybe the next frontier isn’t virtual at all. Maybe it’s physical. People in a room, looking up at light, realizing they’re part of something bigger than their feed. That’s what Es Devlin builds. Not sets. Not sculptures. Stories you can walk through.