ARTWORK Audley Autumn/Winter 2003-4
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Peter Saville says he's through with what fashion has become. "I feel really happy that for the first time in my life I've cut the fucking cord," he says. "I was in Selfridges yesterday and there was a thousand square feet of menswear just over there and I didn't even bother to walk through." So what does he do when he needs new threads? "I buy something because I need something," he explains. If I think, oh I need a white shirt; I will not go to one of the temples of addiction for something. Anna, my girlfriend - her favourite shop is one of the thrift shops in Notting Hill. It's amazing; she comes back from the thrift shop with a pair of white well-made Hermes jodhpurs for ten pounds. This is a wonderful sense of triumph. Not only are they not this season, they're a well-made, good product and they cost only ten pounds. Wearing anything that's 'this season' kind of makes you look like an idiot."
At first this up-yours irreverence seems a bit rich from a man who's worked with the industry's most revered names: from Yohji Yamamoto and Jill Sander in the Eighties and early Nineties, to Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen more recently. But he feels over the last twenty years he's witnessed such a growing process of creative abuse that it's become an industry that now just "doesn't matter anymore". Back in 1985 when he did his first fashion campaign - a brochure for Yohji Yamamoto - he found fashion exciting, a means of emancipation, still part of what he describes as the post-war process of democratisation. People were still learning to express themselves with clothes and, what is more, graphic design had yet to be fused with fashion communication in the way that Saville had fused it, to great acclaim, with music. Saville suggests that, apart from the odd iconic logo - such as Cassandre's for YSL - fashion graphics had, for the most part, been the work of stylists or in-house art directors at magazines.
Saville joined up with art director Mark Ascoli and photographer Nick Knight to form a formidable trinity forging a new convergence of several different cultures: image, book design, typography, photography and fashion. When Knight first suggested to Ascoli (who'd already produced brochures for Yamamoto with photographers Max Vadukul and Paolo Roversi) that they bring Saville on board, Ascoli had given little thought to the value or even nature of graphic design. "'He said, 'What is it - the graphics?'" Saville explains: "Earlier catalogues were just lots of big pictures and not very well conceived. There was no book design at all." Ascoli proved receptive to the ideas Saville brought along, however, and soon became absorbed in the process of choosing paper, print and type. Saville was amazed by the creative and financial freedom granted him by the Tokyo team, enabling him to create a new visual dialogue in fashion. "My feeling is that in the same way I set a new standard for music packaging, this period of making catalogues - we did five seasons, ten of them for Yohji - this is the beginning of the relationship of high-end graphic design and book production with fashion. I think this was it. This was the watershed moment."
Now, he says, we've got to the stage where, not only do "we all know how to dress"; now the industry's ruled over by just a handful of corporations: "Do you want to help buy Miuccia Prada's next house in Sardinia?" he protests. "I feel that certainly over the last five years not only have we got to the point where fashion doesn't matter, it has got to another point where it's a negative symbol of yourself. So, if I see that you bothered to spend £500 that you didn't have on this season's Balenciaga handbag, I feel sorry for you."
Many of Saville's assistants have gone on to capitalise on what he describes as the industry's 'new standard'. At one point, after art-directing two campaigns for John Galliano in the late Nineties; Saville almost became creative communications director of Dior. But differences with Bernard Arnualt, Dior's owner, put an end to this. Saville fully understands the score, as he explains: "To do fashion professionally is the same as any other form of communication design. You have to know the industry inside out. If your client is Bernard Arnault you cannot be flirting with the industry. You can't drop it and be doing a corporate identity for an airliner on Monday and Tuesday and then be doing Dior in Paris on Wednesday. You have to understand the business of your client in any field that you work in. And that is the deal: it's not about design as such, it's about business.
Art direction for fashion is not about making nice things; it's about marketing product. The difference between Yohji as your client and Bernard Arnault is like the difference between a briefing in heaven and a briefing in hell. Yohji was interested in the reason of it all, in the good of it all. That was Yohji's mindset back in the Eighties and there was a point in 89 when we did a campaign and even he didn't feel it mattered anymore."
Surely there must be smaller, independent labels out there that he'd be happy to work for? He says he respects the likes of Bless in Berlin and APC, but: "There's no point in me pursuing that kind of work as a way to make a living as they don't have any money for it. But if they approached me, I would do it." He's also happy working in the industry when he's involved in designing actual product. He found the process of designing knitwear for Clements Ribeiro one season immensely rewarding and currently he's working on a signature range for Levi's Japan. "I want to design something that I myself would wear. I find so much product vulgar and gratuitous. For example, I used to wear Levi's white jeans every day. I had ten pairs of them and in theory Levi's could still make white jeans that I want to wear. But they don't make them the way they used to, now they stone-wash and put holes in them and add all sorts of frills. In the last seven or eight years I've had to buy Helmut Lang and spend a hundred pounds because Levi's don't make a decent pair of white jeans any more. What can they do now other than rediscover what he describes as the 'truth' in their brand and in making Levi's design something he can 'believe' in again.
"Design needs to be something you invest belief in. I don't believe in most things we have now in an over-commodified culture. Design over the last twenty-five years has played a big part in the democratisation of culture - vastly increasing the choice and experience range that people have. When I was twenty I really had to go out and search for clothes. Now everything is all there, whether it's clothes, furniture, restaurants. The entire culture has been downloaded en masse. The design I was idealistic about was the benchmarks - a Corbusier chair, a Chanel suit, a Porsche 911, a Nikon camera, a Saul Bass film title. Those things are still the canon of design and are quintessentially 'true'. And they were socially oriented - part of the idea of this democratisation. Coco Chanel made trousers for women and there was a social message." He points to his Charles Eames desk chair in his large all-white studio/living space in which a long clothes rack separates his bed from his work units. "It was designed forty or fifty years ago and is still perhaps the best modern desk chair. It works and is still relevant now. What we see in fashion is like this new bling baroque. It has its own redundancy written into it. That's not my understanding of design. Fashion's role in social democratisation is over." And by 'truth' he doesn't necessarily mean expensive and widely inaccessible: "Billy shelves from Ikea are another good example of 'truth' in design. They're £35 and don't pretend to be anything other than a really good economical bookshelf. They sell in millions."
Today Saville finds much of his professional fulfilment away from fashion and music. He's currently creative director of the city Manchester, trying to change the 'grim up north' perception of the area held in other parts of the country. He finds the process challenging. "I don't really like sitting in a room full of councillors. For a couple of days each week it's interesting, but I certainly couldn't do it all the time." Nonetheless, he feels it's a role in which he can make a positive change: "The shareholders are the people that live there, as well as their children and their future, and it's my home city. Something like that feels useful whereas shifting another handbag isn't a useful application of my knowledge."
Surely, if he's happy to admit his influence in fashion communication, he must also accept that he helped open this can of worms about which he protests? Yes, he says heavy-heartedly that he admits some responsibility, and reminds me of the very, last panel at his recent retrospective at the Design Museum that said, quite bluntly: "Be careful what you wish for."
"Because," as the age-old cliché has proved to him: "it might not work out to be exactly what you want."
This article originally appeared in Grafik September 2005 Copyright Grafik/Natalie
Avella
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