Very few people end up in the jobs they thought they would have when they were children – we’d have far too many firemen and nurses if they did – but a young Gary Card was pretty spot-on when it came to his career. ‘My dream when I was a kid was to be a toy designer and that’s kind of what I do – but on a grander scale,’ says the 32-year-old when I meet him at his east London office.

Card is the man the fashion industry calls when they want to create a spectacle, whether they need outsized props for an advertising campaign or a series of twisted Disney characters for a magazine shoot, a brilliant shop fitting for a pop-up store or a fabulously witty window display. The quickest way to describe what he does is to call him a set designer, but really he is like a creator of worlds, a man who allows fantasies to come to life, whether that is on a small scale, through illustrations and props, or at the more elaborate end of the spectrum with installations and entire shop spaces given over to his vision.

Growing up in Bournemouth, Card was ‘very, very dyslexic’ and ‘did not like the beach’. Instead he adored cartoons and would spend all his time indoors drawing copies of cartoon characters he had seen on TV. His parents were ‘always super-supportive of my stuff, they knew from a very early age that I was never going to do anything else’ and his father, a builder, indulged his imagination by creating the very first sets Card envisaged. 

‘He was so supportive and energetic when it came to my bedroom,’ Card remembers. ‘He used to fit my bedroom at least once every two years. I had swings in my room and a bunk bed that had multiple layers and steps that went round, so my stuff, in a lot of respects, comes from Dad. He got me excited about spaces.’

After completing an art GNQV (a vocational qualification that no longer exists) in Bournemouth, Card was awarded a place at Central Saint Martins to study set design for theatre. ‘I really struggled with language and the most important thing about being a set designer for theatre is servicing the text and I didn’t care about the f*cking text – I liked big plays, like operas or musicals, but not depressing David Hare,’ he says. ‘But studying theatre design meant I was able to do a little bit of painting, a little bit of costume design, a little bit of making things, so I had the most wonderful time at Central Saint Martins.’

Following his graduation, he worked with photographers and stylists he’d met at university on indie magazines, and soon enough he was collaborating with one of the world’s most famous stylists, Nicola Formichetti. ‘I wrote to him on MySpace and I said ‘I really like your stuff’ and he wrote back and said, ‘I actually know your stuff.’ He’d seen it in AnOther Man. And he said, ‘Would you like to work together on something?’ I was terrified, Nicola wasn’t as big as he is now, but he was still super big. I was 24, I was really scared.’

Soon after his first Formichetti job, brands and retailers began to take notice of Card and nowadays his CV boasts collaborations with Comme des Garcons, Topshop, Uniqlo and Stella McCartney. But Card, who wears purple every day (‘It’s a compulsion, I’m slightly odd with purple’), continues to create his own work and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at Eternal Youth in Dalston, where he will present ‘a vision of a discovered theme park, a place that has aged and died, and had time to mutate and grow by itself. I’m interested in the cross section between something cuddly that looks quite safe, which has then been perverted in some way, twisted, Everybody loves the scary clown and this is an extension of that.'

The warped world he has created for the show sums up everything Card is about: he's a big kid making toys, but they have a darkness only an adult could bring. 

Gary Card's first-ever solo exhibition, 'Abandoned Amusument Park Attraction', runs August 7-21 at Eternal Youth, 378 Kingsland Road, London E8 4AA