2003 05 10 Guardian Peter Saville

FOR THE LOOK OF IT

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/may/10/artsfeatures.art

First published on Sat 10 May 2003 11.29 BST

His album covers for Joy Division and Roxy Music defined the style of a generation, and his influence on today's designers is second to none. But has Peter Saville spent a little too much time perfecting his other great obsession: himself? Caroline Roux meets the design gurus' guru

It's a grey and rainy day in Barcelona, but in one of the city's conference centres a little glamour is going on. On the stage of a packed auditorium, a jaded but suave Englishman in black sweater and white Helmut Lang jeans is holding forth, sighing deeply and dragging on a fag between each slide. Images of iconic record covers and fashion campaigns fill the huge screen. The audience hangs on every word as the speaker provides more than an hour's entertainment with designer tales from the past 20 years.

Peter Saville, art director and an inspiration to a generation of designers, is not a household name, perhaps - but you may have pieces of his work in your home without knowing it. His album covers for Roxy Music, New Order and Pulp are classics (think back to the blonde spear-carrying Amazons on Roxy's 1980 Flesh + Blood), while his fashion projects with Yohji Yamamoto and Jil Sander are still praised in certain circles for their strength and originality.

Saville graduated from art school in the late 1970s, keen to be a player in a post-punk scene where art, fashion, music and film mingled. As style began to grip the British consciousness, the music and fashion fixated Saville (and other designers such as Neville Brody, a founder member of The Face) found themselves in the right time and place to be starting out. Saville's particular contribution since then has been an unerring ability to merge two genres: as a designer, he packages music as he would fashion, and fashion as he would music, bringing a painstaking elegance to the former (the minimal sleeve for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures in 1979, say) and an edginess and sense of performance to fashion (in 1992, Saville and Yamamoto rejected the standard catalogue in favour of a video of artist Bruce McLean struggling in and out of the spring/summer menswear collection).

And then there is his legendary perfectionism. "Peter is obsessive about everything," says his friend Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum in London (venue for a forthcoming retrospective of Saville's work), "except the details of life." A law unto himself, he is seemingly incapable of leaving the house before the early afternoon and eats only in the best restaurants, often with some perfect-skinned model by his side. He is, possibly, his own most enduring project. "Cultivating his playboy image," says another close friend, "is Peter's major occupation." Now, with the publication in paperback of the first book of his work and the Design Museum retrospective, Saville is about to step a little further into the limelight.

He was born in 1955 in a part of Hale, Cheshire, that is about as close as north-west England gets to Beverly Hills. Now the preserve of footballers and their wives, in the 1960s it was an upper-middle-class community of professionals. The youngest and brightest of three brothers, Saville seemed destined for law, accountancy or medicine, but by 14 he had discovered girls and the school art room. Then came model car racing. "I found that anything I applied myself to, I was successful at," says Saville, who has the sort of accent Steve Coogan might adopt to play a posh Mancunian philanderer. Schoolwork did not number among his obsessions, but thanks to an enlightened art teacher Saville ended up at Manchester Polytechnic, where he studied graphic design. He was there from 1975 to 1978, a period when postmodernism had a crucial effect on youth culture.

Late 1970s Britain was, visually, a dull old place. The high street was a beige desert of poorly fitted, badly lit shops; packaging and most magazines were designed in a style that was a hangover from the 1950s, and graphic design was preoccupied with the visual gag (think Milton Glaser's I * New York). "It was awful," says Saville. "But my friend Malcolm Garrett and I looked back through our art books at movements like the Bauhaus in prewar Germany and constructivism in 1920s Russia, and saw a blueprint for a better looking Britain. In this late 1970s moment, a side door to the establishment opened. The powers that be had been caught off guard by this punk thing, and anyone who had it about them to get through the door, well, we just went."

While Garrett began designing record sleeves for Mancunian punk band the Buzzcocks, Saville, by now a Bryan Ferry-a-like in white tuxedo and carefully crafted hair, held back a little longer. As punk's 15 minutes fizzled and New Wave emerged, he seized his moment. Where punk's house style had been a Day-Glo riot of cut-up letters and deliberate ugliness, Saville's response to New Wave was a look of restrained elegance, using modernist typography and enigmatic imagery. It was chic, fashionable and, unlike previous pop imagery, it did not stop being appropriate once you'd hit 25.

As house designer and a founding partner at the newly formed Factory Records, Saville had almost total creative freedom, providing cool graphics for new electronic groups such as New Order, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and A Certain Ratio. In some instances, the quality of the presentation was superior to that of the music; in others, it was a nuisance - the 1980 sandpaper cover of The Return Of The Durutti Column ruined any other record sleeve next to it in the rack. "The bands didn't really ask what I was doing," he says. "With Joy Division, once they became New Order [after singer Ian Curtis's 1980 suicide], nobody even really wrote the songs. And there was no hierarchy in the group. It was an argumentative democracy, where they disagreed with each other as a matter of principle."

Saville's strategy has always been to consider both the product and its market, and, like any good art director, to look for a visual solution that works for both. What sets him apart, however, is the breadth of his frame of visual reference, which takes in everything from fine art and architecture to fashion and film. He hoards away any printed matter, photograph or image that might come in useful at a later date. For the 1986/1987 Yohji Yamamoto womenswear catalogue, for example, he cut the models out of pictures by fashion photographer Nick Knight (who also took the portrait of Saville on page 34), then rearranged them jagged and silhouette-like on a blank, white page - the prototype for the idea was an old Nasa manual. The artwork for New Order's 1993 CD Republic montages a spectacular series of images on the theme of fire and ice, derived from endless orders to photo libraries.

Saville is as exacting about archiving his own experience. A leaf photographed by his long-time photographic collaborator, the late Trevor Key, for the covers of New Order's Substance and True Faith (1987) has been carefully stored in its own shoebox. "It's quite arrogant behaviour to save your scraps like that, isn't it?" says Alice Rawsthorn, who is, of course, delighted to be including it in the retrospective.

By the late 1990s, Saville had taken his recycling of ideas and imagery to a post-postmodern extreme in a new body of work, the Waste Paintings. Although he was at least partly responsible for the growing thirst for new looks and products, he now says, "I was concerned about the speed at which things were coming and going. People were spending weeks or years working on a product, designing a new chair, making a film, and it was lasting as long as its PR cycle. You spend five years designing a new chair, and it's all over in three months." He came across a shredding filter in the Photoshop software package and began to manipulate existing work - Knight's photographs, New Order covers. Some of the results were used to package the band Gay Dad in the late 1990s, along with a pictogram of a walking man as a lighthearted logo. He has sold other Waste Paintings as solo works.

For someone so highly regarded by his peers, Saville's life has hardly followed an easy course, however. His unconventional work habits and unwillingness to compromise have had an adverse effect on his financial and, possibly, critical success. In 1983, he set up Peter Saville Associates (PSA) with the designer Brett Wickens, whose typographic and technological strengths inform much of the work they produced. But Saville's drawn-out production times, often the result of his excessive perfectionism, have never led to happy accounting. "Unless it's perfect, it won't happen for Peter," says Garrett. "Brett has seen Peter take notes when he's on the phone and then rub them out and rewrite them more neatly at the end of the call." His aptitude for spending money on dining and clothing, too, has meant that, in spite of a reputation as the hippest designer in town, he has never been the most solvent.

Employees came, attracted by Saville's reputation, and then went, repelled by the ludicrous hours. "Peter would stay in the Groucho until 2am, then come to work at 4pm. So we were expected to stay till midnight," says one. Another recalls the weeks when Saville would turn up in a new Comme des Garçons suit: "All the money went through one account. We'd sometimes worry if we were going to be paid."

When the recession bit in 1990, Saville and Wickens accepted a partnership with the London-based design group Pentagram, at the time the most influential in its field. The salary this provided serviced their PSA debts, but it was an unhappy marriage. "I think there was some jealousy among the Pentagram partners about the amount of attention he got for what they saw as so little effort," says Garrett. "They didn't try to understand what drove him and thought fashion, where many of his clients were, was superficial. They thought he was a flake and a charlatan."

So, in 1993, Saville and Wickens moved again, this time to Los Angeles and the design company Frankfurt Balkind. But for Saville this was an even less constructive episode, and Hollywood was a huge disappointment. "You feel a bit cheated when you first get to Los Angeles," he says. "You realise that, to make movies, they just go out into the street. There's no effort involved. You think, shit, they didn't even go anywhere special. They just went outside."

There was also the fact that he was incapable of arriving at his desk at 8.30am, as is the American way. He left the job within a year, then survived a further three months in LA by selling off just about everything - books, CDs, furniture - he had bought on his company credit card. When the money ran out, he returned to London. Wickens, by now married and no longer interested in late-night marathons, remained in Los Angeles, ending their long creative partnership.

Saville's private life, meanwhile, has been that of the eternal bachelor: "The last time I lived with anyone was with Martha Ladly [of Martha And The Muffins fame] in the early 1980s." In 1985, the departure of another girlfriend, a beautiful, Cambridge-educated model, broke his heart: "She was a real idealised version of myself," he says, without a trace of irony. "She was on magazine covers, which was quite a thrill to me." Over the years, as he has talked and thought and drunk coffee, a succession of remarkably pretty girls has come and gone.

In 1994, Saville returned home to the excitements of Britpop and Brit art. The high street had apparently learned from his and others' 1980s style revolution, and replaced drab with design. New clubs such as the Ministry of Sound (b.1991) were emulating the slick industrial interior of the Factory-owned Hacienda in Manchester (b. 1982), and Ministry flyers borrowed liberally from the graphics Saville had used on Hacienda flyers a decade earlier. He found that his trademark style was being applied by a generation of designers who had grown up with his record covers.

Assisted by Mike Meiré, a young German advertising executive and New Order fan, Saville moved into an outlandishly louche Mayfair flat in 1996 and together they started a new business, The Apartment. The flat was furnished to the highest specification of 1970s urbanity, with shag-pile carpets, smoked mirror walls and a bedroom in midnight blue velvet. From there, he relaunched his career: journalists who came to interview him would find him in a silk dressing gown whatever the time of day.

Soon, news of The Apartment reached a new generation of musicians. Brett Anderson of Suede recalls being lured there - "I'd done a mural of Unknown Pleasures on my bedroom wall when I was 11," he says - and Saville and Knight went on to create a string of suitably lush Suede covers. For one, Film Star, Saville himself appears as the song's subject. "I said, if you want someone to look and act like a sleazy old film star, then it's got to be you," says Knight affectionately. Anderson remains an admirer: "Just having a coffee with Peter takes five hours, but then he's so much more than a guy who makes sleeves. He's a questioning artist." Jarvis Cocker of Pulp was another visitor, a meeting that resulted in the classic cover (with artist John Currin) for the 1998 album This Is Hardcore - a twisted visual reference to the glamour days of Roxy Music.

Mayfair suited Saville, but Meiré couldn't justify the business's lack of income indefinitely. Saville moved out and joined Knight and his family on their annual holiday in the south of France. "He had these very bright Pucci trunks," says Knight, "and wanted to sit and smoke all day. But we did talk about doing a website." In 1999, Knight set up his old friend in an updated version of The Apartment - an outsized, stripped-wood penthouse in Clerkenwell. An early visitor recalls admiring the space, only to be rebuffed by Saville with the remark that, "Well, it's OK, but it's got a built-in wine rack, for God's sake." From here, Showstudio, a radical new fashion and art website, began to take shape, although Knight's natural bullishness and Saville's reluctance to sign off work proved less complementary than they had before. "On November 27 2000, I pressed the go button," says Knight, who had bankrolled the site. "The more I wanted to go live, the less he did."

Saville is now just an occasional contributor to Showstudio. One such offering was a reworking of Toile de Jouy wallpaper featuring Japanese erotica, created in collaboration with the illustrator and fashion designer Julie Verhoeven. "We really hit it off," says Verhoeven, "although the job was quite bothering. He wanted it to be more hardcore. The bondage side of things does nothing for me and he wanted it. He's very into pornography." Saville and Knight are now back working together again, on the next Pirelli calendar - what could be more appropriate?

A few weeks after his appearance in Barcelona, I met Saville in the kitchen of a suburban house in west London that has been carved into a luscious rococo loft. It belongs to a highly successful former model and her fashion designer husband who live most of the time in France; when they come back, Saville has to move out. Then, his four identical pairs of white jeans (Helmut Lang), blue jeans (APC), black sweaters (TSE) and T-shirts are packed away and taken to a friend's flat in Ladbroke Grove.

Saville's studio is manned by a devoted staff, although the phones are currently cut off. It is not that the work doesn't come in - Saville's current client list includes EMI and Alexander McQueen - rather that the book and retrospective have preoccupied him more than usual. But he is never without his car, his dinners at the Ivy, a packet of foreign cigarettes and an air of well-heeled comfort. There is also the unswerving loyalty and encouragement he gets from his many friends. It's strange that someone who keeps even close friends and collaborators waiting for hours is so universally adored and indulged. Perhaps, if he had a little less charm, he would have had to rely more completely on his talent, which is real, and less on his urbane image - which is, after all, a lesser work of art.

Knight says that Saville should "do something with his hands. Make contact with the real world. Be doing something rather than talking about it." Wickens says that he should have more faith in his purely artistic projects such as the Waste Paintings, and "occasionally come out of retirement to do a design project". The book and exhibition should bring him new opportunities, however, and give him another chance to prove how good and inspirational he can be. If nothing else, Saville's inability to compromise means there are no skeletons in his design closet - he has made few, if any, mistakes.

As Saville himself says, "By the late 1990s, when the next big thing after me had run its course, there was a reassessment and I was elevated to the hall of fame. At least I still had integrity. I wasn't doing nappy wrappers for Mothercare." He lights his fifteenth cigarette of the hour. "It helps my sense of wellbeing to be regarded like that. I say to myself, 'Peter, you haven't got any money, you don't live anywhere, but are you happy with who you are?' And I say, 'You know, I'd rather be Peter Saville than anybody.'"

· The Peter Saville Show is at the Design Museum, London SE1, from May 23-September 14 (020-7940 8790 for details). Designed, by Peter Saville, is published by Frieze on May 23, at £19.95.