“I had a lot of fun with child kidnapping,” says the set designer, illustrator and T contributor Gary Card, speaking of his recent campaign for Comme des Garçons that involved adapting dark Victorian children’s stories. “And people turning into horses and slugs and things — that got my imagination ticking.” The London-based Card, 28, covers the High Street with clients that include Liberty, Stella McCartney, Adidas, Hermès and Top Shop. “What I love about my job is I have the opportunity to make both art and commercial products, and something else that can be a little bit stranger and more off-beat,” he says. In a recent foray into fine art at the London gallery Spring Projects, he exhibited “a gigantic cave made out of white Plasticine, which was then sculpted into 3,000 tiny heads…so you walked through this strange vortex of little white faces staring at you.” In appearance, Card suggests a cross between David Hockney and the British avant-garde pop star Patrick Wolf. But the creative chameleon, who wants to design furniture next, shrugs off the comparison. “My personal style is whatever I find on the floor, really.”
