The invitation card to Y-3's runway show was emblazoned with the words "Meaningless Excitement" in holographic print. This is probably the best motto to define the fashion industry at the moment, but also the relentless fashion weeks. The slogan wasn't actually created by Yohji Yamamoto for his collaboration with Adidas (that celebrated its 10th anniversary this year), but by Peter Saville.
Considered as one the most influential graphic designers in Great Britain (but also the most reluctant since he often stated in interviews that he never set to become a graphic designer), Saville is well known for his Haçienda posters and Factory Records covers such as Joy Division and New Order’s albums, including "Unknown Pleasures" (1979) based on an image of radio waves from pulsar CP 1919, "Movement" (1981), with its art plagiarised from the cover of a 1932 essay by Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero in honour of Marinetti's visit to the Trentino Region, and "Power Corruption and Lies" (1983), based on the painting "A Basket of Roses" by Henri Fantin-Latour.
In the '90s, after returning from Los Angeles (where he had tried to launch a multimedia practice that eventually reveled unsuccessful) to Great Britain, he started working with various designers, including Yohji Yamamoto, Jil Sander, John Galliano, Christian Dior, and Raf Simons.
Inspired by freedom, provocation and a post-modern vocation, Saville created fresh and timeless designs for famous fashion houses and brands, yet he also retained a sort of disilluded position about the industry, that he sees as a trap that pushes people to spend, spend, spend.
This collection - based on sporty and functional yet elegant silhouettes - was conceived by Yamamoto as a reaction to fast and useless fashion that "uses" people. Saville came up with the ironic slogans "Meaningless excitement" and "For further advice please contact our fashion advisors" that were printed on T-shirts, but also with the multicoloured graphic stripes for micro-mesh T-shirt dresses.
Saville hates logos that easily identify a brand imposing a sort of livestock mark on the wearer, this is the main reason why the traditional Adidas triple stripe was either turned into an abstract multi-coloured rainbow or into a series of black and white graphic lines crossing T-shirts and stockings. One perfect example of logo deconstruction came up in a ball gown made with stretch material, decorated with three ribbon-like white stripes appliqued around the bodice and the hem.
The combination of different creative forces such as image, music and fashion may inform both Saville and Yamamoto's careers, but the most important point about them is that they both see fashion as something that becomes powerful when people uses it to create their own personal image, vocabulary and world, and not when people are used by it.
The merit (and the fault) of this collection stands in having turned the commonplace into the desirable (the menswear looks were mainly borrowed from street styles...), but that in many ways is also the merit (and the fault) of Peter Saville's work in general.
So far, though, this one remains the collection with the best motto of the current New York Fashion Week and also the best timed collaboration. Homaged in 2011 during the "Postmodernism" exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Saville was recently awarded the prestigious London Design medal, and will appear at the Global Design Forum on 16 September, as part of the London Design Festival (until 22nd September 2013). That's a good enough reason for some "meaningful excitement" for Saville's fans.
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