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Virgil Abloh, Westside Gunn, and Peter Saville
15 April 2026
I recently spent some time looking into the work of Peter Saville—especially what he did for New Order and Joy Division. I had come across his work before, but not directly. The first time I really noticed it was through Raf Simons’ early collections in the 2000s, where a lot of the graphics felt distinct but hard to place. Looking back, that was probably my first introduction to Saville’s visual language.
What stood out to me this time wasn’t just the work itself, but how often Virgil Abloh referenced Saville as a mentor. It made me think less about influence in a surface-level sense, and more about how a way of thinking gets passed down.
If I had to put a word to it—borrowing from the academic art world—it feels postmodern. Not in a strict, textbook definition, but in the way both Saville and Virgil approach design as something that can be recontextualized. Images, references, and symbols aren’t fixed; they can be pulled from one place and given new meaning somewhere else.
Saville did this through record sleeves—pulling from archives, science, classical art—and placing those references into a completely different cultural context. It wasn’t about creating something entirely new from scratch, but about framing existing material in a way that made people look at it differently.
I think you can see a similar approach in Virgil’s work, especially in his cover for Pray for Paris by Westside Gunn. The cover uses a classical painting, but it doesn’t feel like a reference for the sake of aesthetics. It feels intentional—like the image is being repositioned into a new cultural conversation.
I don’t think it’s a direct imitation of Saville, but more of a shared approach. Both seem interested in how meaning changes when you move something from one context to another. In that sense, the connection between them isn’t just visual—it’s conceptual.
And that’s what made the connection click for me. It’s less about tracing influence from one designer to another, and more about recognizing a way of seeing that carries across music, fashion, and design. I have more to say about the post-modern way of social commentary in design, and how that is evolving, but that is for another blog post I'm working on. Thoughts?