Set designer enters Lorde, Kanye West floating box feud - points out both copied opera production

November 14, 2018

The Kiwi superstar's see-through shipping container was used during her Melodrama world tour.

The plot has thickened in the set design feud Lorde launched against rapper Kanye West this week on social media.

The Kiwi pop star accused the West of copying the suspended glass shipping container she used during her Coachella set and during her current Melodrama world tour.

"Don't steal - not from women or anyone else - not in 2018 or ever," she wrote.

But now the person who designed Ella Yelich-O'Connor's Coachella set has taken to Instagram with a post of her own, pointing out that neither artist's box is terribly original.

"The idea of a floating glass box of course is not in any way new and the geometry precedes all of us," designer Es Devlin wrote in the first of three posts showing photos of a suspended glass box in a 2007 performance of Carmen by the English National Opera. "The form finds another layer of resonance in each new context."

Devlin has worked with West in the past but said she didn't design the set used by the artist over the weekend as he performed at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

"I admire both and see no imitation at work here," Devlin continued. "I think the more interesting point is that both artists, responding to our dis-jointed times, are being drawn to this gesture of the fragile floating room: the world un-moored from gravity : where the rules of civilisation and identity as we have known them may soon no longer apply."

Lorde's Instagram post, which showed similarities between hers and West's sets, has since been deleted along with all other posts since early April.

"I'm proud of the work I do and it's flattering when other artists feel inspired by it, to the extent that they choose to try it on themselves," she wrote before imploring her former collaborator not to steal.

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