There has always been a strong theatrical streak to the creations of Zandra Rhodes so perhaps she has found her natural home as the set and costume designer for an extravagant new production of Aida coming to London in November.

The production of Verdi's Egyptian epic opera will be unveiled today as part of the new season at the English National Opera.

Rhodes has worked on two operas - The Magic Flute and The Pearl Fishers - in San Diego, where she spends half her life with her partner, film mogul Salah Hassanein, but this will be her opera debut on home turf.

"I'm looking forward to it. It's very special to be doing something in my own country," she said.

Rhodes took as the starting point for her designs a series of drawings and sketches she made in Egypt in 1986, which inspired a fashion collection called Secrets of the Nile and offered a stark contrast with the versions of Aida she watched on video when she won the commission.

She said: "I've only been brought to opera quite late in life. In San Diego, my partner and I are special members of the opera, so I go and see opera on a grand scale. But when I was asked to design Aida, I didn't really know it, so I got about four different tapes.

"Most of them were in white nightdresses and the one at the Met [Metropolitan Opera, New York] was absolutely magnificent.

"But I thought, 'Why would they come to me? If there's already one in white nightdresses, that isn't what I should be doing - I should re-think what the characters look like.'

"I decided on a dream world of gold, turquoise and ultramarine." Rhodes began work on the production more than two years ago and "fell in love with the project ... it's taken me over." The show has just opened in Houston, where it was hailed as "boldly stylised" and "eye-popping".

The ENO will be hoping the dramatic staging may provide the kind of boost offered by director Anthony Minghella's similarly sumptuous staging of Madam Butterfly, which was a sell-out success in 2005 and will return in January.

The company has suffered a rocky few years with the departures of two chief executives amid much controversy and two emergency funding bail-outs by the Arts Council. It is currently in talks with unions over plans to cut 10 per cent of jobs.

For the new season, film director Sally Potter is to tackle Carmen and there will be the British premiere of Lost Highway, a masochistic love story by Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth based on David Lynch's film of the same name.

Minghella will return to stage the St Matthew Passion and the company will put on Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor for the first time and a new version of Leonard Bernstein's Candide.