Michael Howells, who has died aged 61 after suffering from a heart condition, exemplified old-style art-school virtues. He had more ideas than he could ever execute, despite his solid workload over 30 years of production design in theatre, film, television and fashion. He could stage extravagance on a budget of £10, or simplicity that cost a fortune and needed a squad of curtain-drapers; and he could, and did, carry out every aspect of his presentations himself – tweak the tassels, arrange the moss, and demonstrate to couture models how to sashay.
Fantasy was Howells’ talent and became his business (“I get paid to fantasise”). The Paris couturiers Jean-Paul Gaultier and Christian Lacroix employed him to stage fashion shows, but it was John Galliano at Dior, from 1996 to the late 2000s, who egged Howells on, with the costs never considered. They produced together what we now call “experiences”, extreme immersive theatre for all the senses, with perfume wafting from the carpets, and butterflies, chickens, goldfish, dogs, smoke, all in motion.
He responded unfazed to briefs such as Galliano’s 2008 show request for “Edie Bouvier Beale meets Edie Sedgwick on holiday with Andy Warhol in Coney Island, with Spanish feria”. Howells was a human Rolodex for sourcing the near-impossible – props included a stuffed ostrich in sunglasses, on top of a telly.
His film and television production design had a distinct attitude to period decor, from Emma (1996), with its superior-department-store Georgian style, through Shackleton (2002), its objects whittled down to the few essentials, to the ITV series Victoria (2016-17), which showed how royal taste of the 1830s to 1850s shaped our ideal of fantasy (it’s what we think of when we say “palace”). Howells appraised stately interiors countrywide for Victoria, and built two seasons’ worth of sets in former aircraft hangars outside Leeds; the parquet floors were MDF and the rooms and corridors miles of flats (boards) on struts – although the 30 tonnes of muck used to suggest Ireland in the potato famine were all too real.
Michael was born in Droxford, Hampshire, to Mollie (nee Thomas), who had been a secretary before her marriage, and Victor Howells, a mechanical engineer; they moved to Malawi when he was six months old and to New Zealand six years later. When they returned to the UK they settled in Stroud, Gloucestershire. At Marling grammar school Michael designed sets for plays and became interested in floristry, winning local flower-arranging contests.
After an art foundation course at Cheltenham School of Fine Art, in 1977 he went to Camberwell School of Art and Design (now Camberwell College of Art), in London. He found post-education work painting decor for a Laura Ashley shop, and began to arrange flower displays professionally for the big public and private bashes of the moneyed 80s, then branched out into planning parties, at which decor, amusements and food were arranged like shop windows that guests could enter. Later, he dressed shop windows too, achieving the Olympics of the craft, Selfridges Christmas displays.
Howells loved parties – he once arrived for a fancy-dress do as a statue with a seagull atop his head – and staging them was his metier; months of deep research into a theme, weeks of preparation improvising with glue and glitter, and an event that evaporated in a night. He liked being in the moment, telling a friend: “Well, it lasted for eight hours, there were 1,000 people, so that’s 8,000 hours of memories.” The most remembered was Kate Moss’s 30th birthday party, with the theme the Beautiful and the Damned, for whichhe provided a whole house of pleasures.
Through introductions on his party circuit, Howells began supplying mise-en-scène for fashion sequences that were like movie stills, photographed by Mario Testino in Harpers & Queen in the mid-1980s; and later settings for editorial shoots by the fashion photographers Tim Walker and Nick Knight. The cinematic quality of his work led to an assistant art director job on Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and art director on Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992). Both films needed Howell’s tableaux aesthetic; their long tracking shots moved through his inventories of intriguing objects across foregrounds and backgrounds.
Howells moved into working for major fashion companies in the 90s and 2000s, when designers and luxury brands were looking for fresh-confected fantasy for shows and ads. At Versailles for Dior’s 60th anniversary in 2007, Howells and Galliano told a baroque fairytale alluding to Jean Cocteau’s movie La Belle et la Bête. As with all Howells’ work, the more the audience could unpack the many layers of references he had laid down, the more fun they had, but everybody could understand the mood, and the extravagance absolved the couture clothes of absurdity.
Only high fashionistas experienced these unique performances live, although his modest exhibition about the milliner Stephen Jones at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2009 shared the same immersive approach. It was about the actual work of creation, as Howells respected craft techniques – he had mastered many – and wanted to restore craftworking to many more fields.
His ads and displays for fashion firms including Mulberry and Burberry were less wild, more playful. His stage work for dance companies was far plainer, the most witty being Lady Into Fox (2006) for Ballet Rambert, where he was a regular for 20 years; it caught the spirit of his favourite interwar era of design.
When Instagram arrived, his account was a pleasure to the eyes. No swanking and no phoney staging, just moments spotted and held: the first snowdrop, the shattered glass of a phone booth, the dismantling of a movie set.
For a decade until 2017, Howells annually transformed Port Eliot in Cornwall for its festival on an outlay of almost nothing, feathering the chandeliers and creating a ballgown from paper. It was perfection, then it was gone.
He is survived by his mother, his sister, Catriona, and two nephews, Mathew and Shaun.
• Michael Howells, production designer, born 13 January 1957; died 20 July 2018
