A reinterpretation of one of popular culture’s most iconic images.
Peter Saville’s impact as a designer on the cannon of pop culture is insurmountable. Aside from the inescapable visibility of his work for Factory Records, the ethos which he applied to creating artworks has permeated into the graphic language of the now in ways many are unaware of. The greatest example of this perhaps being the influence he had over the most influential designer of the past few years, the late Virgil Abloh. Virgil would often cite Saville as his ‘mentor’ and references to him are scattered throughout his work.
Some highlights of Saville’s varied porfolio include designing a kit for the England football team, acting as creative consultant for the city of Manchester as well as forrays into the world of fashion alongside Nick Knight and Yohji Yamamoto. He continually applied design thinking that was simultaneously playful and practical seen even in his earliest work.
Out of everything he had a hand in, it is the artwork for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures that has seemingly had the most cultural impact as one of the most iconic album covers of all time. It was infact the band however who found the image as Saville divulges in the video below…
Over forty years later Adidas have instigated a return to the image with a variation featuring in the identity of Manchester United’s 22/23 Kit. The original image was an interpretation of data signifiying the existence of a Pulsar (a black hole), the updated image is an interpretation of data gathered from player’s biometrics.
Fortuntately this clever reference to the circle of life is not exclusive to Man Utd as Saville has also worked on a shoe with Adidas Spezial as part of the project. The shoe reapplies the monochromatic state of the Unknown Pleasures cover, arriving as an iteration of the Blackburn silhouette in a black suede with the image stitched on to the the tongue. Given the limited amount of pairs releasing you need to enter a raffle to secure a pair, click here to enter it at Wellgosh.
