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Ever since his first work for the fledgeling Factory Records in the late 1970s, PETER SAVILLE has been a pivotal figure in graphic design and style culture. In fashion and art projects as well as in music, his work combines an unerring elegance with a remarkable ability to identify images that epitomise the moment.
When the fly posters for Suede’s new single Film Star were pasted on walls across London in 1997, the languid male sprawled elegantly on the back seat of a Lincoln limousine was instantly recognisable to any graphic design enthusiasts who happened to stroll past. It was Peter Saville, the graphic designer, who had not only art directed the cover of Film Star and the rest of Suede’s Coming Up album, but had posed for the photograph by Nick Knight.
Such a visible manifestation of the designer’s signature was exactly what Brett Anderson, Suede’s lead singer had wanted when he had sought out Saville and asked him to design the artwork for Coming Up. Obsessed as a teenager by Saville’s work in the 1980s for Factory Records’ bands such as Joy Division and New Order, one of Anderson’s treats as an adult indie rock star whose record company was willing to indulge him was to commission Peter Saville to design for his own band. Another of Saville’s clients at the time, Jarvis Cocker, the lead singer of Pulp, had commissioned him for exactly the same reason.
The images that Peter Saville created for Joy Division, New Order and, later, Suede and Pulp were so compelling that they struck the same emotional resonance with the people who bought those albums and singles as the music. Just as the musicians in those bands wrote and produced their songs as catalogues of their thoughts and feelings, so Saville has conceived his images – for fashion and art projects as well as music – as visual narratives of his life.
