Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
work was going to be my passport out of it.”
With Peter Saville Associates in financial crisis and
Factory Records on the verge of collapse, he finally hit
commercial reality in 1990 and joined the Pentagram
group in LA as a partner. With Saville’s odd working
hours he rarely gets up before the afternoon and works
until midnight and his antipathy, not to say hostility,
towards corporate till-ringing, the relationship was
doomed from the start. “I just will not make this analogy
between what I’m being paid and how much time
we spend on it. It gets as much time as it needs.”
The current interest in Saville has a lot to do with
the demographics of the creative industries. There is a
whole generation who grew up as fans of, in particular,
Roxy Music, Joy Division and New Order, who are
now making the decisions. “When I first met the president
of Givenchy Parfum,” says Saville, “he said ‘Oh,
Monsieur Saville, I am a fan of Joy Division, I am a fan
of Peter Saville.’ I was 45 and he was 39.”
And it wasn’t just with couture fashion. “Throughout
the 80s I saw the High Street convert. At Next, I saw
so much of what I’d done for Ultravox. It was everywhere.”
He explains: “At the design firms, the grownups
weren’t hands-on anymore and the work was left
to the kids.”
At the Design Museum retrospective (designed by
the architect Lindi Roy), Saville’s work is arranged
chronologically. The middle section is very dark, and
BUY Peter Saville books online from and
shows his catalogue and advertising work for the fashion
designer Yohji Yamamoto. The Game Over series
of photo library stock images from 1991 for Yamamoto
captures the sense of consumerist exhaustion and
overkill amid an impending recession, which has been
much copied in terms of its abstraction and typography.
A Guide To Never-Never Land adumbrates the future
of advertising in the 1990s, where the product is so far
off the page that it almost becomes anti-advertising
advertising. A car production line, all flashbulbs and
gleaming surfaces, stretches off into an infinite hell of
consumerism, as much a break with reality as Saville’s
image is from Yamamoto’s clothing.
When he’s talking about the retrospective, it seems
as if Saville’s incapable of letting go and trusting his
work to others. “I’m unhappy towards the people who I
do the work for,” he says. “That’s my mood right now,
which is kind of ironic after what would appear to be
a successful show and book. It’s not what you would
imagine. No one has gathered a comprehensive review
of the work done by Peter Saville Studios over 25 years
and looked at it in order to write about it or curate a
proper show for a museum. Nobody. Has. Looked. At.
The Work.” He says that the Design Museum exhibition
lacks context, that there is nothing explaining why
the work is important. And when he says that the show
is his “greatest hits”, he means it pejoratively.
Although he sounds exhausted by the demands
426
More
Spike
email
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z